Magic's Promise v(lhm-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  And yet he had seen a ring identical to these acting on his behalf. They could be just the badge of the household, yet in magic-fearing Highjorune, why would the ruler's own household wear something spell-touched?

  Vanyel wondered; it all tied in, somewhere, somehow. He had to find the key. But answers were not forthcoming; not yet. He lost track of time down there, and certainly under these circumstances his stomach was not likely to remind him. It felt like being on the Border again; every muscle tensed and waiting for something to leap on him from behind. And no Yfandes to guard his back. He'd never been so conscious of being completely alone before; he might easily have been the only living being in the entire palace. And it was far too easy for his overactive imagination to people the shadows beyond his mage-light with pathetic or vengeful spirits.

  When he finally completed his inspection of the cellars and their occasionally grisly contents, it was with profound relief that he climbed the kitchen stairs to emerge, blinking, into brilliant light.

  That was the first welcome surprise in a long while. Someone had taken it upon himself to remove the bundles of candles. That same someone had stuck them on every available surface all over the kitchen, and lit them. Light transformed the look of the place from that of a gloomy cave to a normal island of commonplace, a bright and cheerful haven of sanity. It was a profligate use of candles, but there were hundreds of candles. Vanyel stepped into the kitchen with a feeling of having left a little hell behind him.

  Tashir and Jervis were by the hearth, sorting through several large bundles.

  "Where's Savil?" Vanyel asked. He squinted into the light. "What time is it?"

  Tashir jumped, and stared at Vanyel with a momentary expression of panic, as if he did not recognize him immediately. Jervis continued with his sorting, unperturbed. "She's tryin' to track down where that trap was set up," the armsmaster replied. "And it's early evening. Give us a hand here, eh? We come up with some likely stuff out of closets and chests; if you get it sorted out an' made up as beds, I'll see to dinner."

  Jervis was as good as his word; by the time Savil drifted in, still a little unfocused, he had another fair meal put together.

  The blankets, comforters, and sheets that Tashir and Vanyel had made into tolerably comfortable beds smelled strongly of sendle and lavender; proof enough that they'd been laid away in storage. Vanyel judged by Tashir's silence and white lips that the two had probably come across the same appalling signs and stains of slaughter that he had, though probably not the actual remains. The party that had searched the palace had most likely dealt with the actual bodies. Which was all to the good; if Tashir had seen what Vanyel had been dealing with, the boy might well have snapped. Vanyel gave Jervis high marks for unexpected sensitivity; in the state of nerves the young man was in now, one bloodstained sheet come upon in a bundle of bedding he was expected to use would likely send him into hysterics. Safer, far, to have searched out the linen closets and taken things sealed away for winter use.

  And it was also probable that the pattern below had been continued above; rooms that had been occupied at the time of the massacre might not have anything usable in them anymore.

  Savil wandered over to the fire and sat down absently on the bed nearest her pack. "Any luck?" he asked her. She shook off her vagueness and finally looked at him instead of through him.

  "Yes and no. I think I've got the site narrowed to the second floor, and I think I know how it was set. Someone brought in a catalyst, then using that catalyst, enlarged and strengthened the spell's compass over a long period of time. With no shields on this place, it would have been apprentice work once the initial spell had been set." She accepted a plate from Jervis without looking at it. "It's nasty stuff, ke'chara. Makes my skin crawl. Hard to force myself to probe it, now that I know it's there. Like some kind of web with something incredibly evil at the heart - and I'm over on the edge of it, trying to see into the heart without waking what's there. And there's something very, very odd about it. It reeks of blood-magic, as you might well expect, but there's 'blood' involved in it in a much subtler way.''

  "Eat," Vanyel advised, guessing that she hadn't paused for food or drink since this morning. "Jervis, did you and Tashir find anything?"

  The armsmaster chewed and swallowed before answering. "Maybe. If you're done below, I'd like your word on it. It's a room, first floor, smack square in the center of this building. Not much bigger nor a closet, an' has just one thing in it; a floor-t'-ceiling pillar; same stone as the outside. Might just be a kinda kingpost for the palace, it's bigger around than I can reach, but I never seen anything like it. You said look for odd, well, that's odd."

  "Tashir?"

  The young man froze in mid-bite, and stared at him like a cornered rabbit.

  Vanyel felt an uncomfortable sympathy for him. His own Empathy told him Tashir was dancing on a hair-thin thread of nerve at the moment. There was no doubt in Vanyel's mind that he was trying to jar his memories loose. There was also no doubt in his mind that the youngster was, literally, going through hell. But there was no help for it; if the mystery was to be solved and Tashir cleared of guilt, it was likely to take all four of them to do it.

  "Tashir, what do you know about this room Jervis found?'' he prompted.

  Tashir swallowed and licked his lips. "Nothing," he replied faintly. "They wouldn't ever let me in there. Everybody else got taken in at least once, but not Mother, and not me."

  "Tashir, that's something,'“ Vanyel chided gently. "You said 'everybody'; do you mean that literally? Servants, too?"

  The young man nodded so hard he started to tip his plate off his knee. Jervis caught it before it spilled. Tashir hardly noticed, he was so intent on Vanyel. "Servants, too, Vanyel. Everybody."

  "That's more than odd; that's smacking of a mystery." He brooded for a moment, staring at the crackling flames in the hearth. He was greatly tempted to seek the place out now, this instant.

  But then he thought of the empty rooms filled with wreckage and the long, haunted halls he'd have to traverse to get there. He hesitated, and shivered. Strong stomach, battle-trained or not, there was a limit.

  I don't think so. I'm not up to it. Besides, I'd rather not chance a light being seen from outside. It'll be there in the morning.

  "D-d-d-do you want to go there tonight?" Tashir stuttered, patently not relishing the thought at all.

  "No, Tashir, not tonight," he replied, half-smiling as a rush of relief brought a little more color to the youngster's cheeks. "Not tonight," he repeated, echoing his own thought. "We've all had enough for one day. It's been there all this time; it'll be there in the morning."

  Jervis broke the silence that followed. "Van, I was noticin' something. Rooms where there wasn't any folks, hardly anything's smashed. Maybe a curtain torn, chair broken, that kind of thing. Rooms where there was people, they're wrecked. The more people, the worse."

  "It's the same down below," Vanyel told him, as Jervis continued demolishing his dinner thoughtfully. "Savil, does that kind of pattern suggest anything to you?"

  She scowled with concentration. "Yes, but I can't think what. Damn!"

  Vanyel followed a stray thought. "Tashir, when they broke in and found the mess, where were you?"

  "Th-the Great Hall," he faltered. "I just sort of woke up and I was there."

  "And the worst wreckage was in the Great Hall?" Vanyel turned to Jervis for confirmation.

  "Near as I can tell from what I've seen so far."

  As he tried to trigger his own memory, he had a momentary flash of that dream he'd had, of being surrounded by a whirlwind of devilish creatures. He realized with a start that made him sit up straight that that dream actually had an echo in his recent experience. The fire flared on the hearth, and with it, memory.

  He'd been playing bait, at the beginning of the Karsite ampaign, sitting all alone in an old keep just behind the Border.

  The keep was supposed to be held by nothing more formidable than an old man and a
handful of retainers. Certainly the Guard was days away at the best forced march pace, though that shouldn't have mattered. Because no one was supposed to know that the keep was held so weakly. And no one was supposed to know that it guarded a very strategic supply route.

  But someone did know; someone had been leaking information to the Karsites. Poorly-guarded keeps of strategic importance behind the Valdemar lines were being decimated, the occupants slaughtered, leaving holes the strategists didn't learn about until it was too late. Or worse w en the strategists checked on their supposed holdings, they found keeps somehow occupied by hostile forces.

  Vanyel read the signs of magic, and had known only magic could counter these attacks. So Vanyel had ridden Yfandes to exhaustion to reach this one, a likely target. He'd cleared out the old man and his following, and waited.

  And the attack had come, in the form of a gretshke-Swarm; demi-demonic creatures (mostly head, teeth, and appetite) that, taken individually, were inconsequential. An ordinary fighter could deal with one - or two; and they certainly were not immune to cold iron. But a Swarm - that was another matter. The Swarm contained hundreds, if not thousands, of the creatures. You could kill them by the dozens, and still they would overwhelm you, like encountering an avalanche of starving rats.

  A mage didn't control a Swarm; he just unleashed it. When the food was gone, or when they were sated, they would return to their own plane if they were given an exit. So a mage using them would customarily lure a Swarm to the Portal to their plane that he had opened within his target area and cast a shield about the target to keep the Swarm from escaping. He would wait an appropriate length of time - usually no more than a candlemark; the Swarm was fast - and open the Portal again to pull whatever of the Swarm remained back to their own plane. He would take the shield down then, and an occupying force could move in.

  All this required someone on the level of Adept; which made it likely that the mage in question was one of the three Adepts the Karsites had hired when they began this. One of the three had threatened, then launched the brutal incineration of an entire town; the town had been saved, but in stopping him Mardic and Donni had called the flames on themselves in a desperate attempt to confine them.

  It had worked. It had been a brave, unselfish-and ultimately fatal - ploy. The best that could be said was that their pain had been mercifully short.

  Vanyel had been determined that before he was pulled off the lines, he would have that particular mage's life. By preference, given the other things they'd done, he would have all three, but he wanted that one.

  The only problem was, the mages themselves refused confrontation; striking time and time again where he wasn't. By the time of this ambush he'd had enough. He had begun hunting them with the patience and stealth that would eventually earn him the name “Shadowstalker” when he tracked down the second Adept.

  But that was in the future; at that moment, the first step on his self-appointed road of revenge, he had been waiting in the darkened keep, fueling the delicate illusion that made it appear to that unknown enemy that only the old man and his dozen retainers and fighters were within those walls, and all were asleep. He felt the shields go up; he felt the portal open. The Swarm descended on the Hall of the keep, where he waited for them beside the firepit in the center. And he threw up his own shield, abandoning the illusion, and watched as the Swarm ravened outside it, tearing the scant furnishings of the Hall to shreds in frustration, unable to reach the meat so tantalizingly out of reach.

  While he smiled grimly and set up a second shield between the Swarm and the portal. When the mage opened the Portal again, then established a probe to check on the results of his work, Vanyel would seize on the probe before he could withdraw it, and use it to send him an unexpected surprise.

  It was the image of the Swarm shredding cushions, furnishings, and tapestries that interested him now; an image he sent swiftly to Savil, who seized on it with an exclamation. Jervis raised his eyebrow.

  “We think we may have an explanation for all the destruction," Vanyel explained absently, as he and Savil conferred in Mindspeech. "It's complicated, and there's a lot of 'ifs' and 'buts.' It may take us a while to unravel them, but the explanation fits the current evidence."

  Jervis just shook his head. "If that's magery, then it's too much for me, Van," he said, yawning. "I'll leave that to you. I'll just show you that room and let you deal with it, eh?"

  "I'll do that," Vanyel replied, then turned his mind to looking for the traces that would tell him what kind of things had torn the hall to shreds-because that would tell him a great deal about how strong the enemy was - and importantly, might even give a clue as to who.

  But in the end, he and Savil sought their beds without any answers but one. How strong was very. Adept at least.

  Because the traces that would have distinguished what the trap-spell had unleashed had been skillfully wiped away. All that remained was the heavily camouflaged spell itself (which only an Adept could have detected under the camouflage) and the bare traces of magic that had alerted them in the first place.

  Jervis and Tashir were already asleep when they gave up.

  "Sleep?" he asked Savil, hoping she'd answer in the affirmative.

  "We might as well. We aren't going to get anything more tonight." She stretched once, and began burrowing into her blankets, practically radiating exhaustion. Vanyel realized then what kind of strain she was under - all this complicated, involved sorcery, and maintaining her position as the Web's Eastern Guardian. He resolved to take more of the burden from her as soon as he could. This was not fair to her, nor was it good for her.

  I wonder if there's a way to tie all the Heralds into the Web, as power-source at least. That would take fully half the burden off the Guardians.

  "Want me to put out the candles?" he asked, glancing around at the burning tapers still bedecking corners of the kitchen.

  She opened one eye thoughtfully. "No. Just leave them, if you would. It isn't as if we need to hoard them, and I don't think I want to go to sleep in darkness for a while."

  Vanyel thought it over a moment, and nodded. "You know what, teacher-mine?" he said softly. "Neither do I."

  She chuckled wearily, and closed her eyes again. "Absurd, isn't it? Here we are, two of the ranking Herald-Mages in Valdemar - afraid of the dark.''

  He wrapped himself up in his own blankets. "If you promise not to tell anyone, I won't either."

  A light snore was his only answer, and he fell asleep with the comforting glow of the candles all about them.

  The tiny room vibrated with power.

  It was a round room; stone-walled and wooden-floored-and-ceilinged. The walls were pale sandstone, the rest pale birch. The pillar of stone clearly reached higher than the ceiling and lower than the floor. And the room, with barely enough space to walk around the dark pillar was, very clearly, set up with permanent shields, like those in the communal magic Work Room at the Palace in Haven. Small wonder neither he nor Savil had detected this artifact before. Vanyel set a cautious hand to the pillar of charcoal-gray, highly polished stone, as Tashir and Jervis watched him curiously. It was warm, not cool, and felt curiously alive.

  And very familiar.

  This was a Tayledras heart-stone. The Vale of k'Treva had such a stone, a place where the physical, material valley itself merged and melded with the energy-node and intersection of power-flows "below" it. Such a stone was the physical manifestation of the energies fueling the Tayledras magics, and this physical manifestation was peculiarly vulnerable to tampering. So the heart-stones were guarded jealously - and always deactivated when Tayledras left a place.

  This one should not be here, except, perhaps, as a dead relic of former inhabitants. It should not be alive, and more, responding to his touch, physical and magical, upon it.

  "This -" he faltered, and pulled his hand away with a wrench. "Jervis, you were right. This is not something I would expect here. I'm going to have to Mindtouch it."

&nbs
p; "Anything we can do to help?" the armsmaster asked quietly.

  "To tell you the truth, I'd rather you took Tashir out to the Great Hall to see if you can help him remember," Vanyel said, trying to keep the fascination of the heart - stone from recapturing him. "There isn't much you can help me with, and you two being here would be a little distracting. But if you'd poke your nose in here from time to time -"

  "Anything I should watch for?"

  "Well," Vanyel replied wryly, "if I'm turning blue, that's probably a sign something's wrong. Other than that, trust your own judgment."

  Jervis' answering laugh was gruff, and sounded a little like churning gravel, but it proved that of the four of them, he was the one least affected by their macabre surroundings. "All right, let me take the boy out, and we'll see if we can make some progress."

  "Thanks.” And thank you, Jervis, that we can trust each other now. I don't think I could be doing this otherwise. Without waiting to see them go, Vanyel turned back to the stone pillar, and placed both palms and his forehead against it -