Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  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.”

  “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 -

  And it took him into itself.

  For a very long time he was conscious only of the incredible, seething maelstrom of the energy-node itself. It was like plunging into the heart of the sun, and yet remaining curiously unscathed and untouched. It was different from tapping into the node; there he was outside, separate from the energy he sought to control, and he was dealing with a single, thin stream of force. Now he was a part of the force, with no intent - or chance - to control it. But control was not what he wanted; he wanted only observation, and answers.

  But to have an answer, one must first ask a question. He framed it in his mind, carefully inserting all the nuances into it he could.

  In words, it would have been a simple, “Who left this here?” In thought it was infinitely more complex than that; asking “who” specifically, and “who” as a class. The heart-stone was not an intelligence, but it remembered. And every question that was balanced by an answer would call that answer out of the stone. Vanyel got a very clear picture of Tayledras Adepts; several of them, all of them radiating great power, including one with the peculiar blue-green aura of the rare Healer-Adept. That particular Adept was much clearer, and lingered longer in the mind, and the implication was that it was this Healer-Adept that was responsible for having left both stone and node still in their active state.

  If Vanyel could have started with surprise, he would have. Although they could, and on occasion did, act as ordinary Healers, Tayledras Healer-Adepts concerned themselves with Healing, not people, but environments. At restoring the balance nature had intended. At Healing the hurts that either magic or the hand of man had dealt there. That a Healer-Adept would have deemed it necessary to leave this potentially disastrously-dangerous energy s
ource in lands soon to be settled by ordinary humans - that seemed to indicate that there was a terrible need that overrode all other considerations.

  “Why?” he asked, urgently.

  And felt himself being drawn down - deeper - below the bedrock, and into the roots of the earth itself. And he realized with a shock that the pillar was that deeply rooted, too.

  There was tension here, a tension that increased as he went deeper, a vast pressure to either side of him that squeezed him until he could scarcely breathe. And still the force that had seized him to answer his question drew him deeper, and deeper still, to a point where the rock began to warm about him.

  Then he saw it. Running from north to south, invisible from above, yet carrying implied within it such peril that his blood ran cold, was a crack in the last layer of rock itself. A fault; a place of slippage, following the river bottom.

  That was natural enough; what was not natural was the hole punched through the fault down to the molten core of the planet, something probably left from the Mage Wars. That was what the heart-stone was planted above. And all of Highjorune was built directly on that fault. More, it extended the width of Lineas and out into the unsettled lands. If it slipped -

  And it was only a matter of time before it slipped and caused a catastrophe that would destroy the city in fire and earthquake-and much of the surrounding country beside. Vanyel could not imagine why it hadn't happened before this - until he Saw where the energy of the node was going.

  It was feeding into a complicated spell so convoluted and involved he could never have set it himself. It could only be the handiwork of that Tayledras Healer-Adept - and it looked to be the masterwork of an entire lifetime as a mage and an Adept. It was holding the wound closed, and keeping the fault from slipping.

  More, it would, given time enough, Heal the wound and the fault, redistributing the strain elsewhere, until this was no longer an area of instability. But it would take time, hundreds of years or more, and any great siphoning away of the node-energy would deprive the spell of needed power. And if that occurred - depending on the amount of energy stolen from its proper usage, there would come anything from a minor tremor to the major, devastating disaster the Adept had been trying to prevent.

  The force that had him let him go, and he drifted back to the “surface” more than a little dazed.

  But he still had one more question. What was the connection between Tashir's family and this artifact at the heart of their palace?

  That answer came immediately, and almost as words.

  They were the Guardians.

  And with that came a rush of knowledge that rocked him physically away from the stone. He opened his eyes to find himself pressed back against the wall, staring at the pillar of dark, volcanic basalt, with his mind seething with information.

  He staggered out of the tiny room, carefully closing the door behind him, and made his unsteady way into the kitchen, bypassing the Great Hall entirely. He wanted to lie down, very badly. This was not the first time he'd queried a heart-stone, but it was the first time one had responded with such a flood of facts and memories. The heart-stones he'd merged with had been slow, old, and so peaceful that the answer you wanted might take candlemarks to drift within grasping. By contrast, this one practically flung responses at you before you finished the question.

  He made the kitchen easily enough, and spent some time sticking up new candles and lighting them before wobbling back to his bed and falling facedown into the blankets.

  He must have slept, because the next thing he knew, the others were clattering about the kitchen, there was a smell of frying bacon, and his stomach was declaring war on his backbone.

  He rolled over on his back, stiffly, painfully, and Savil immediately knelt at his side and peered into his eyes. “You were in shock-sleep,” she said. “We couldn't wake you. I hope to hell you got something worth it.”

  He took a deep breath, and discovered that his ribcage was sore, that all his muscles ached. He must have held them tensed for hours. He nodded. “Answers,” he said-croaked, rather. “I got answers. I got answers. Savil, that's a heart-stone in there. And it's awake!”

  Her mouth had dropped open the moment he'd said the words “heart-stone.” She shut it again with a snap. “Eat first, and get something to drink. Then tell us.”

  He sat up slowly, more than ever grateful for all the soft comforters to cushion his aching body from the stone floor of the kitchen. There was a fire in the hearth, and the other three seemed warm, but he was cold - cold.

  Jervis shoved a plate into his hand, Tashir a cup of tea into the other. Savil and Jervis then pretended to deal with the remnants of their dinners. Tashir made no such pretense, hovering at Vanyel's side and watching every mouthful he took with impatience.

  It was a little embarrassing, but Vanyel could not find it in his heart to blame him.

  When he put down the empty plate, the other two gave up all pretensions and hovered around him.

  “I'll try to make this short,” he said, feeling a little awkward with all their attention so fixed on him. “This palace is situated on top of a place where several lines of magical energy meet and collect - we call that a 'node.' Nodes - the very powerful ones, that is - frequently aren't natural. They can be created artificially by a particular group of Adepts called the Tayledras - the 'Hawkbrothers.' “ At Jervis' and Tashir's look of blank nonrecognition, he added, “They live in the Pelagirs. Most people have never heard of them. Fewer still will ever see them. Savil and I are among the few.”

  Savil nodded. “They're very secretive, and for a good reason. They do - almost as naturally as breathing - something damned few other mages are even capable of imagining. They manipulate the energy fields of the world around us.”

  Vanyel interrupted her gently. “They do two things, really; they drain magic left from the old wars away from lands that ordinary people are moving into, and they use that magic both to Heal those lands and to create sanctuaries for magical creatures that are displaced by the folk moving in. When they settle in a place, they generally create a node under it to use. When they leave that place they always - or so I always thought - deactivate and drain the node, and reroute the power-lines running to it.”

  “That's what Starwind always told me,” Savil agreed, shifting her position so that she rested her chin on her knees.

  “Well, they didn't this time,” Vanyel replied. “The node is still fully active, and the heart-stone that is the physical link to it is still alive. That's what that pillar is, Tashir, the heart-stone. And that brings me to why.”

  He licked his lips and closed his eyes for just a moment, to center himself. “Some time when people first moved into this area, Tashir, one of the Tayledras remained behind, and selected your remote forefather to be the hereditary guardian of the heart-stone. He charged him to keep it safe, and to see that no one in Lineas ever dabbled in magic. That charge has been passed down to everyone with the blood of the Remoerdis Family - because that blood carries Mage-potential with it, and because that very wise ancestor of yours saw no reason to limit the guardianship to a favored few. The more guardians, he thought, the safer - and I think he was right. After all, this has gone on for generations without any inkling of the power here leaking outside of Lineas. That's the meaning of those rings everyone - except you and your mother - wore. They link the wearer to the heart-stone and the guardianship, and the spell that binds wearer to ring and to the guardianship allows the stone to act upon the wearer to keep them safe, and to safeguard itself. I actually saw that last in action - your mother's maid Reta was moved by the heart-stone to tell me some of what I needed to know. It was quite uncanny; she acted for all the world as if someone had put a second-stage Truth Spell on her. Back to the subject. You didn't get one, and weren't sealed to the stone, because your father didn't believe you were of his blood. To settle that question, the stone says otherwise. The stone recognized you as being of the blood the moment you entered the room. Y
ou are the true-born son of Deveran Remoerdis of Lineas. And if your father had ever conquered his own doubts and suspicions, and allowed you into the room, even as an infant, he would have known that, too.”

  Tashir hung his head, and Vanyel could see his shoulders shaking. He laid his hand on top of one of the youngster's, and Jervis put his arm around the young man's shoulders for a moment.

  “Now - the reason why the node was left active; there's an instability underneath Lineas; right underneath Highjorune. The node is literally holding it together. If it were to be disturbed, especially if it were to be drained, as a careless or ignorant mage might manage, Highjorune would certainly be destroyed by a terrible earthquake, and quite probably all of Lineas, a good section of Baires, and even some of Valdemar. That is why the people of Lineas have been trained to shun and discourage mages. That is what your people have held in trust for centuries - and I think that the power of the node is also why the Mavelans want Lineas. Unfortunately, I suspect they see only the powerful node, and have made no effort at discovering why it is there.”

  “I doubt they'd care,” Savil said dryly.

  “I wish I knew differently.” He put down his mug, and rested his forehead on his own knees. “Gods,” he said, his voice muffled. “Well, we have part of the puzzle.”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder; Savil's. “Tired, ke'chara?” she asked.

  “Not tired, precisely,” he replied, raising his head and smiling into her eyes. “Just a little - divided. You know what querying a heart-stone is like; you become part of it. It's hard being a rock; they have such a strange sense of time - and priorities.” He shook off his feeling of disorientation and patted her hand. “No matter, now that I've got that solved, I can help you with that trap-spell. If you can get me safely inside it, I think I can unravel the components enough to tell what triggers it and what it acts on.”

  “We're getting somewhere, too,” Jervis put in diffidently. Tashir raised his head and sniffed, once, then scrubbed the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and nodded. “You want to tell 'em, Tashir, or you want me?”