She only stared, but her silence seemed to shriek and rail against him.
“This time, we ported them to Pyran. It was not a simple thing. First, we had to port one there who actually survived and could port the others to him. He was not the first we sent. Some were crushed by falling, others were entombed in stone, and some…well, some we could not bring back at all.” He was babbling nervously, trying to fill the silence. “This was no mean feat in itself since no one here has seen the city on that side in nearly four thousand years, and then—”
“Spare me the tedium of your logistics,” she whispered. “I take it you sent mages.”
He nodded. He had thought that to be self evident. “Once there, they fulfilled their mission readily.” He looked into her eyes and drove his point right into her heart. “They sought him out and killed him.”
Her eyes did not blink. She did not breathe. After a time, she shook her head. “No more than this? To say ‘they sought him out and killed him’ and leave it so?” He watched her eyes brim with tears before she looked away. “You killed him,” she said quietly. “One of our own. That’s never been done. It’s simply not done!”
He raised his chin. Was it defensiveness he felt or defiance, the sure knowledge that killing her old lover had cut her to the quick? He fancied it was more the latter and secretly reveled in the knowledge. He nodded. “Nevertheless, it is done. Casualties were high, predictably, but in the end, our agents prevailed.”
“Yet the disturbance remains.”
He sighed. “The disturbance remains.”
She smiled. “The answer is obvious—he yet lives. The ineptitude of your ‘agents,’ as you called them, could very well explain how your turbulence is untouched.” She raised one brow. “Did they see him dead?”
He enjoyed watching hope fight with agony to emerge victorious from her wizened features, so much so that his voice took on an almost cheerful tone. “They not only killed him, they dragged him out and burned his corpse to dust.” He laughed viciously. “I wish you could have seen it.”
Her wrinkled lip twitched. “They lied, then.”
“No, I think not. The vision mark was clear. But killing him seems to have made very little difference, as you see. The turbulence did seem to diminish for a time, but––”
“Diminish? When you woke me, you told me it had grown worse!” She blew out her breath and closed her eyes again, following strands forward and backward through dimensions, untangling the skeins as best she could without actually touching them. For one of her power to touch them would disrupt them further still.
“Seemed, as I said.” He insisted, discreetly following her progress along the strands at a distance. “Perhaps it diminished, or perhaps we only wished to see that it did. Regardless, it did not vanish altogether as we had thought it would. This is the point at which I believe we erred: Thinking that perhaps he was not the source of the problem after all, or at least not its only source,” he paused to let that register, “I sent our agents to confront and destroy the next most likely source.”
“The prince. Damerien.”
He nodded. He paced away from her, choosing his words carefully. “Along the way, our agents were sidetracked, and…”
Her eyes snapped open. “Sidetracked? How? They did have specific orders, did they not?”
He swallowed hard and prepared himself for another of her harangues. “As I am given to understand, they were recruited along the way to help in another attack, one they judged to be beneficial to our goal. They had to make a decision immediately with no time to consult us first.”
“Ah, and they were destroyed, were they?”
“Not precisely.”
She waited.
“They were recruited into an assault on a castle called Brannagh. This, after they had destroyed the temple of B’rad––”
“I’m sorry,” she said, the usual growl in her voice suddenly shaking. “I thought I heard you say ‘Brannagh.’”
“Yes, I…”
Her voice became nearly a whisper. “Surely they did not attack the ancient stronghold of Damerien’s sons… That cannot be what you said.”
“Ah…”
“Were they to succeed, you know right well that this would fulfill part of the very prophecy we work to defeat…”
“They…attacked Brannagh and destroyed it, yes.” He rubbed his brow, feeling the sparks of her rage from across the chamber. “All was done without our knowledge or consent. We had to grant them autonomy after a point, you see, for practical reasons. We could not be there to guide them at every turn. We informed them of the goal and trusted them to do what was necessary to achieve it. What we failed to do was to tell them what they must avoid…”
She paced the floor frantically. “And did they indeed go on from their glorious success in fulfilling part of the prophecy to do as they were tasked, to destroy Damerien, in hopes of defeating it?”
He watched her a moment, then shook his head. “Damerien was already gone, fled. He was warned, apparently, by the…fall of Brannagh.”
She screamed with rage and frustration.
“They continue to seek him, but for now, it seems he has vanished. His household upholds a façade that he is still in residence, but several horses were missing from the stable. We can only assume…” He shook his head. “In any case, if our agents do not locate him soon, they are to return for new orders.”
“Attacking Brannagh…” She shook her head in disbelief. “Have you any idea what they’ve done? What you’ve done?”
He nodded miserably. “We saw the turbulence on the great strands, as foretold, and we took steps to avert the prophecy, but in so doing—”
“In so doing,” she roared, “you have helped it along as if you had set it in motion yourselves! You could have done nothing at all and been victorious for eons to come! All the forces on that horrid island together could not have destroyed Castle Brannagh and pushed the prophecy forward! So what did you do? In your zeal to do something, anything at all, to stop this turbulence in the strands, you sent them the only force that could!”
“Yes.” He had had enough of her derision. His voice dropped to a deadly whisper. “And thus you find yourself so inconveniently awakened from your lovesick stupor over a now dead mage to help us set the universe aright.”
She slapped him so hard he fell to the ground. “But that I will need your strength to undo the damage you and the others have done, I should crush you here and now. After all,” she said, bitterness dripping from her voice, “Guardians can be killed, as it turns out. So be thankful that I find you indispensable because the day, the hour, the moment I do not…” She glared at him to make her meaning clear. Then she shook the dust from her matted white hair, and stormed out of her chamber. “Where are the others?”
He stood, rubbing his jaw. “They await your pleasure in the library.”
“Very well,” she said, moving down the corridor. As she moved, her hair softened into gentle curls, and the strands seemed to refill with their original dark blonde color. Beneath the filmy seamless robes, her body filled out again, and her skin took on its accustomed suppleness. A scent of jasmine filled the air around her. “And for pity’s sake, Guardian, stop your sulking.”
Two
The Hodrache Range
Dith crouched in a patch of snow in the trees lining the small clearing and looked over the horses grazing at the river’s edge. Nothing seemed to mark any of them as the one ridden by Hallin. The only strands of energy he saw around the horses seemed meant to conceal them, and he brushed the feeble strands aside with a wave of his hand. Nothing else seemed to bind any of them to the other mage in any way, which was a mixed blessing at best. If there were such a binding, it would surely mark the mage’s horse for him, but just as surely, nothing Dith could do in that case would let him take the horse short of killing Hallin outright. Not that he would have a particular problem killing Hallin, but at the moment, he had no idea where Hallin was. The l
ast he’d seen of them, the injured mage and his Hadrian companion had been near Galorin’s Keep, high on the mountain, and that was…
He squinted up at the sun, looked around at the snow. He had no way of knowing how long ago that was, actually. He’d lost all sense of time inside Galorin’s Keep. Judging by the cold and the freshness of the snow, he supposed it was still sometime late in the Gathering or early in the Feast of Bilkar. The horses were still here, so he could not have lost more than a few days at most in the Keep, but any more than that, he could not guess. He’d never studied the stars well enough to guide himself by them, so they would be of no use to him, either.
He supposed the date was of little concern. He cared only that the special horse was still here somewhere, just where Hallin and the others had left it, just as he’d hoped it would be. Since leaving Galorin’s keep, he had thought of little else.
Seeing another mage, even one sent to destroy him, had been exciting and oddly reassuring. In his whole life, he’d seen only two others. One had tried to mentor him, always vexed at how he did not follow convention, and the other had been his first lover. In the end, they’d each betrayed him to save their own skins. In vain, as it turned out.
Truth be told, he felt some pangs of guilt at taking the injured mage’s fastest means of getting aid. To kill someone outright was one thing. It was quite another to leave him stranded and injured in the snow. Then again, Hallin and his Hadrian companion had had plenty of time to make their ways back to the horses. Most likely. Well, he told himself, they’d had longer than he had. If nothing else, they’d had however long Dith was in Galorin’s Keep as a head start, so they should have been and gone already. If they hadn’t claimed the horses by now, he reasoned, they most likely would not.
He had heard the scream, after all. Hallin was too clever to have waited around to die in a fire he could not see, so as excruciating as the port would be, Dith was sure Hallin had ported both himself and his Hadrian companion straight back to Montor.
Absolutely certain.
Besides, the thought of gaining a horse’s speed to Pyran was too good to let pass untried, especially if Hallin was likely to lead a mob back into the Hodrache to find him. He frowned. That was something he hadn’t considered.
You are out of time.
He stepped silently into the clearing, assuming as unaggressive a posture as he could manage, but even so, three of the horses nearest him bolted away. Only one remained. Perhaps a score of paces off, a large horse with a thick blue-gray coat frosted white at the tips grazed quietly with its back to him. Its kinky black tail flicked out of habit or perhaps boredom since the flies had long since frozen to death in the mountain air. As he’d hoped, Dith saw no especial ties, no unusual strands of power, nothing binding the animal, yet it alone of the horses at the riverside withstood his presence. This was a good sign indeed.
What are you doing? This is a waste of time.
“Easy,” he soothed, as much to ease his own nerves as those of the horse. After all, this horse could not be nearly as well trained as Zinion, and had Gikka not been there to control him, Zinion, the legendary Brannagh horse-at-arms who could hold discipline even with screaming demons charging him in the darkness, might well have trampled Dith in a panic.
He approached this animal as Gikka had taught him, steadily, smoothly, well clear of its rear legs, making quiet sounds so as not to startle the beast. But while the horse turned an ear toward him––only one, as if it could not be bothered to pay more attention than that––it did not deign to look around at him, still calmly pulling up plugs of frozen grass to chew. It knocked an impatient hoof against the ground, and Dith wondered if it might walk away. But no, it held its ground.
Encouraged, he hitched the ugly orange rucksack higher on his shoulder and reached out to touch the horse’s side. There it was, that shiver of revulsion that horses had for mages, and Dith started to pull his hand back, ready to jump out of the way if the horse started bucking, but unlike Zinion, this horse did not shy away from him, much less rear or kick. If anything, it leaned into the contact, encouraging it. In that moment, in that brief contact between himself and the horse, Dith felt a strange probing at his mind, a gentle seeking, and he began to understand. He moved around toward the poor creature’s head, patting its shoulder, rubbing gently at its neck, feeling at once the horse’s revulsion at his touch but also its strange determination to maintain that touch. Then he saw the horse’s face, and his suspicion was answered.
This horse could not see.
It was not that the horse was simply blind. Its face was like that of many of the other curiously ugly wild horses he’d seen in his travels except that, beneath the unusually long, thick forelock that stretched down from its ears to its muzzle, the skin and even the skull itself were closed completely over without so much as a thought to eye sockets. It was as if the very idea of having eyes was absurd. He supposed that normally such a creature would be consigned to working in mines or would have been killed at birth and fed to the dogs.
He looked back across the glade considering. Was this the nature of the bargain between the horse and the mage, then? Hallin allowed the creature to use his sight for its own, and in exchange, the horse allowed him to ride.
A vague sense of trepidation flowed over Dith, and he wasn’t sure from whence it came. Surely not the horse. Surely not himself.
A blind horse? Are you sure this is wise?
Against his better judgment, Dith eased himself up onto the horse’s back and tied the dirty orange rucksack to the ties that already held a dusty bedroll behind the saddle. So far the horse was amenable and seemed not even particularly interested in what he was doing. It seemed this would not be as difficult as he’d thought. He felt no rebellion, no sense of testing any boundaries. This horse was well trained indeed. But he remembered Gikka’s advice which he’d never had opportunity to use before now, that it was important to take command immediately, to let the horse know you are not to be trifled with. So he drew himself up and took the rope harness in hand.
Then, in answer to the animal’s gentle probing, he magnanimously granted the horse his full vision.
The poor creature immediately flew into a panic, bucking and whinnying in terror, nostrils flared, spittle flying, and Dith had to cling with both arms and both legs or risk being thrown. It was too much, to go so suddenly from blindness to seeing the world fully as he did, with all its strands of power and all the shadows of possibility overlaid. He eased away apologetically and instead let the horse take vision for itself as it would. Almost at once, the animal’s fear subsided, and he felt the warmth of the horse’s gratitude flow through him. The beast settled itself, biting up another crunchy plug of grass for comfort.
The horse’s mind was completely unlike his own. The gratitude he’d felt was not a clear articulated message but a raw and rather primitive emotion, mostly relief and an acknowledgment that his fear was eased at Dith’s will. But that was all.
Oddly enough, he could not probe back into the creature’s mind, no matter how it sought and probed for sight in his. This did not alarm him, however, since he began to doubt that the creature could understand very complex thoughts in any case. Maybe there was simply nothing there to probe.
Of course not. It’s…a horse.
He found this rather disappointing, actually, since he’d always admired and almost envied the relationship Gikka had with Zinion, as if her horse understood her so well that he could act on her merest whim almost before she herself knew what she willed. The other Brannagh horses-at-arms were likewise so clever and so well disciplined that they gave the appearance of great intelligence, and this was one more reason he’d been driven to seek Hallin’s horse in the first place.
By contrast, this horse did not seem to respond to anything at all. In fact, Dith despaired of even getting it to move. A fine thing that would be, for Hallin to lead the Montorians back into the glade many days hence only to find Dith still sitting on the h
orse, tugging and nudging and kicking at it, unable to make it move at all.
He tried nudging it with his knees, talking to it, pulling at the rope, but it calmly chewed some more frozen grass. Even so, Dith knew he didn’t feel any stubbornness or refusal there. In fact, if anything, he felt only patience, as if the horse knew he would figure the whole business out soon enough and was content to wait until he did.
After a while, Dith decided that trying to make the horse move was pointless when he had yet to consider his path. He knew he needed to get to Pyran, but he would prefer to avoid Montor to do it, which meant he needed to move more east than south and cross the river at the first opportunity while it was still narrow enough to cross easily but without coming across any impassable cliffs or chasms. Perhaps there was a bridge along the way that he hadn’t noticed.
Suddenly the horse was moving.
This is a terrible idea…
The other horses made half hearted efforts to fall in behind them, uncertain, wondering if they were meant to follow without their riders, but between their discomfort at being so near a mage and their lack of enthusiasm for another long trek through the snow and ice, they went back to the river’s edge and the sure grazing along its bank.
The horse picked up speed slowly as it went, as if aware that its rider had never ridden before, guiding itself as if Dith had told it exactly where to go. Even while he sensed that the horse was taking care not to throw him, Dith clutched awkwardly at the horse’s thick mane, trying to keep his balance.
Before long, the ugly blue-gray horse was carrying him smoothly and swiftly downward through the mountains, certainly much faster than he could have gone on his own. If the horse was at all perturbed by the fact that this terrain bore no resemblance to what he’d seen with Hallin on the climb up the mountain, he gave no sign of it.
Eventually Dith reduced his involvement to merely sitting and keeping his balance against the steady rhythm of the horse’s gait, and he was able to relax a bit. Before he’d seen the Brannagh horses, he’d never had any interest in riding. Horses had always seemed to him more trouble than they were worth, much like people. People were worse, of course. People would betray you, people would lie to you. People would sell you to atrocity and sleep the night unburdened.
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 4