Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2)

by Jordan MacLean

  “And halt, I say!”

  The rider slowed.

  “What’s all this, then?” the guard growled, the barest taste of disapproval creeping into his voice as he looked over the rider and horse for weapons. Seeing none, he crossed his arms and took on the manner of a schoolmaster with an unruly child. “Coming into Pyran for a masquerade, are we, with the robes and the boots?”

  “We?” Dith looked down at him, watching the smugness darken into a glower, “I have business in Pyran. Open the gate.”

  “Dressed like that, and you have business in Pyran?” The guard squinted up into Dith’s unsettlingly blue eyes. “Someone put you up to this, boy? Or would you just pour salt in our wounds?”

  “Unbelievable. Four thousand years later, and they’re still peevish. I knew those of Pyran bore a grudge, but I had no idea…”

  “I come to Pyran on my own business. That is all you need to know.”

  “No, son. I keep the gate, so I decide what I need to know, and what I need to know is, what do you hope to gain, riding into Pyran dressed like that?”

  “Dressed like this,” the mage leaned down from his mount and beckoned the guard closer. “I gain full use of my power,” he said softly.

  “You don’t scare me,” scoffed the guard. “Horses can’t abide real mages. Every schoolboy knows that.”

  “Well, then I suppose you’ve nothing to worry about.” Dith smiled darkly. “But tell me, can your clever schoolboys also open the gates? You seem less than able.”

  “The gates open in two hours,” snapped the guard turning to walk away. “Come back then, and if you’ve learned manners, mayhap I will let you through. Mayhap not.”

  “Think!” The barked word was enough to make the guard turn in alarm. Dith glowered at him. “If I must wait until the gates open, do you really suppose I could enter Pyran unnoticed, without causing strife? I’ve heard stories of how we of the Art are treated here.”

  “Yes, and for good reason! After what you people did?”

  “Easy. There’s more to this than we see. I cannot believe so many years would leave their hurt this raw. Have a care.”

  The guard shook his head. “You come into Pyran playing the sorcerer, after what went on, and you take your chances. Comes a reckoning to you, not a soul of this city will raise so much as a brow to help you.”

  “Yes, yes, as it was in Montor.” Dith rolled his eyes in exasperation. “As it is everywhere I pass this far north. I’ve had quite enough of this Hodrachian provincialism. I have done you no harm.”

  The guard waved him off dismissively. “Tell it to the sea. I’ll not be opening the gate early for any false mages today, thank you. We’ve had more than our share of real mages lately, and we don’t need any more magic tomfoolery or sleight of hand to darken our days.”

  “Ah, indeed!”

  “How do you mean? Other mages, here? What other mages?”

  “All right, I’ll play.” The guard crossed his arms with a sneer. “Those others, they were real mages––a bloody army of them, all afoot. By my count, a thousand strong.”

  “A thousand!”

  “Yea, maybe more. More mages than anyone here had ever seen, together or otherwise, more than we even thought existed, all suddenly upon us. Not a word spoken, not a haypenny spent, just them taking whatever suited them, whoever suited them, like we were so many cattle to them.”

  “This worries me deeply. I have not seen this level of wanton arrogance in mages since…. Ask him if any among them killed anyone.”

  Dith asked.

  The guard frowned at him and shook his head. “Only those who tried to stop them, as I say. Raped and stole plenty, but no cold murder.” He looked behind him through the gate. “Tore the town up and left it bleeding in a heap when they left, but almost out of clumsiness more than malice, like they meant nothing by it. Like a horse stepping on an anthill. Made it none the better for us ants, of course.”

  “No wanton killing. That is a relief, at least. These mages were almost certainly the ones who attacked my keep, in that case. I cannot imagine such another army of mages wandering Syon. Now we know they came through Pyran, but the question is, where did they come from? And more importantly, where did they go? I have my suspicions, but…”

  “Did anyone talk to them? Did they say why they were here or where they came from?”

  “Nah, nobody could understand a word they spoke. Not as they were inclined to talk much anyway. They just climbed up dripping wet from the sea just north of the piers.”

  “From the sea?” Dith frowned. “How do you mean? Do you think they lived there, or perhaps swam here from somewhere?”

  “Lived there, under the sea! What an imagination! Here’s how it was: first, just one of them climbed up from out the water and looked around. We’d thought him a survivor of a wrecked ship or some such, but he vanished before anyone could get near enough to ask. Just gone. A while later, the rest come popping in, neat as you please, like to deafen us all with the noise of it.”

  “Brilliant. The sea is always more or less at a level at a given time of day, and the northern bay is nice and deep, so if the calculations are off, there’s little harm done. No need to reckon the height of the land or the positions of buildings or people. The seas can be turbulent, but if you’re near enough to shore, that’s survivable.”

  “We only just managed to get right again, this many months later. Business is back to normal in the last month, and the fishing fleet’s only just returned to port.” He nodded behind him toward the town. “You’ll find the taverns and hostels are full up, I reckon.”

  “I suppose I would even if the fleet were out, considering.”

  The guard’s anger seemed to have subsided, but now, remembering who it was before him, it crept back into his tone again. “So now, here you come, dressed like one of them, like a joke to rub our noses in our pain. But you come riding a horse so no one takes it too seriously or thinks you’re the one who harmed his sister or the one who emptied his stores. Coward. You’d hurt people in their hearts then cry ‘it were but a joke!’ ere they come to beat the whoresblood out of you. I’ve no more to say to you. You run off and come back when the gates are open, and you take your chances with the citizens then.”

  Dith shook his head with a laugh. “Oh, and we were getting along so nicely, too. Very well. I will make this as simple as I can.” Dith shrugged the rucksack up on his shoulder irritably. “I sympathize with your town’s misfortune, but I am a mage. Believe it or don’t, as it suits you, but I have business here, and the sooner you let me in to see to it, the less likely it is that I will raze what’s left of this city to the ground. Unlike those others, I am not squeamish about a little ‘cold murder,’ as you called it.” He smiled, but there was no warmth to it. “I ask only as a courtesy. Now, either you open the gate, or I will.”

  As if on cue, Glasada neighed nervously and skittered over the path. Dith raised a hand toward the gate and looked at the guard expectantly.

  The poor guard’s eyes widened as he looked at Glasada’s eyeless face for the first time, and a glimmer of doubt crossed his face. “Easy now! No need to get vexed about it,” he said with still a shadow of his former bluster. “I will open for you, but do not you make me regret it.”

  Dith allowed the guard his impotent parting growl and lowered his hand. He was far less concerned with winning the argument than with achieving Pyran and finding passage across the sea. If passing the gate were the worst obstacle in his path, he would be thrilled, but with news of the mage army having passed through Pyran, especially with the destruction they’d left in their wake, he began to despair of his success.

  “You want to try it your way, very well. But I think you waste precious time.”

  It was not as if Galorin could help him port straight into Byrandia. As he’d told Dith before, the landscape will have surely changed in four millennia. So, barring that, he had to find a ship to take him across.

  “Indeed,
if you can find passage aboard ship, it’s all to the better. We will certainly make less noise that way. I just despair of the likelihood.”

  Dith did not think much better of his chances. He would be lucky to find a ship’s captain willing to speak to him, to say nothing of finding one willing to attempt the crossing with him. Most of the captains in Pyran were Hadrian, and they would never allow someone with his blue eyes on their ships. He saw no point in even talking to them. Furthermore, he supposed that any Bremondine or Syonese captain foolhardy enough to attempt the crossing was not a captain he should trust to attempt it, which left him in a bit of a conundrum. Still, if no one here would try the journey, there was always Brannford.

  “No, no, not Brannford. The crossing’s many times as far if we set out from Brannford, and the sea is just as angry. We will find passage here or not at all. But not with you dressed like this.”

  “You’re joking. Sir.” The Syonese captain kept his seat.

  “No, Captain,” said the disguised mage, “I am quite serious. I need to reach Byrandia, and I was told your ship is the strongest of the fleet and most likely to survive the journey.”

  He felt the captain’s gaze travel over him, from his long nearly white hair to his rich clothing. The captain looked closely at the heavy velvet of his cape, the bright silver buckles of his belt and scabbard, not to mention his lovely sword, and he could almost hear the calculations in the man’s mind––clearly Dith had sufficient money to pay to outfit a ship for a voyage to Byrandia. But the captain did not seem convinced. His eyes kept returning to Dith’s filthy orange rucksack.

  At last, the ship’s captain shook his head. But he was not angry. The sunburned corners of his eyes wrinkled with a certain mirth, and his fingers played over the turned up ends of his graying mustache. He grinned “I can’t help but wonder if this is not some kind of elaborate joke. Not to say I’m not grateful for the jurfaele, mind you, but what you ask…” he laughed. “Did the other captains put you up to this? Having a bit of fun at my expense, just because of a drunken boast?”

  “The Hadrian captains?” The mage’s blue eyes twinkled. “Do you suppose they would even speak with me?” He took his seat across from the captain. “I ask again, can your ship make the crossing or not?”

  The captain, challenged on his ship’s ability, set his mug down quietly and glared at him. “If any ship can make the crossing, my Jenna Calera can.”

  Dith smiled. “I am pleased to hear it.”

  “And my question is why she should.”

  “Coin.” He settled back in his chair, easing into the negotiation. “What other reason do you need?”

  The captain laughed. “You don’t have much commerce with sailors, do you, son? We don’t sail for coin.” He took up his mug and drank. “We could be farmers for coin and have an easier life of it.”

  Ah, yes, the romance of a life at sea, Dith mused. But he knew that if they reached an agreement, coin would play a large part. Very well, then, he could humor the man. “Fame, then. If you take me to Byrandia, yours will be the first Syonese ship to make landfall there in thousands of years.”

  The captain nodded while he drank. “Better, better. Appealing to my sense of glory and adventure, beat the Hadrians there, and so forth. I must admit, there is a certain appeal to that.” He chuckled again. “All right, enough dancing. Let me put it another way, and this I ask in all earnest: why should I risk my ship and my crew for your voyage? What is our part in all this?”

  Dith considered. “Fishing is not very lucrative during the Feast of Bilkar.”

  “Unless you know where to fish.” The captain set the mug down on the table and looked him in the eyes. “Boy, don’t try to tell me my business. You can’t give a better reason to go than that fishing in the off season is a bit of effort? That’s call to dally with our wives, not set out for unknown waters.”

  Dith stared at the table for a long time, uncertain what he might say. It was a long, uncertain stare that he knew told the captain more than perhaps it should have. “Perhaps you could be the one to open new trade routes…” he offered weakly.

  The captain cocked his head. “Perhaps my question should be, not so much why we should make the crossing, but why you should. Is this some kind of dare your friends have set you to?”

  “That’s my business,” he answered, shrugging up the rucksack on his shoulder.

  “You bring your business aboard my ship, it becomes my business.” The captain crossed his arms. “Did you break the law, kill someone? A bounty on your head? Some girl with your brat in her belly?”

  Dith sighed. “No, nothing so…nothing like that drives my crossing.”

  “Then what does? A man, especially one who is clearly no sailor, begging your pardon, does not decide to go picnicking in Byrandia over his morning tea.”

  “Oh, this should be rich. Go ahead, tell him.”

  Dith took a deep breath. How could he possibly convince this captain, the only one in all Pyran who had even been willing to talk to him, to take him and his eyeless horse across the violent eastern sea to Byrandia because a strange ugly rock in his rucksack and a voice in his head push him that way?

  He chuckled bitterly at the hopelessness of the situation, finally accepting defeat. “Never mind. You would never believe me. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  “Suit yourself, but it’s no trouble.” The captain shrugged, draining off the last of his tankard. “I could listen to almost anything over another jurfaele.” When Dith made no answer, he continued. “Son, I understand what it is to be young. Listen, I’ve a berth free and plenty of work hauling in fishing lines if you’re inclined. It’ll put calluses on your hands, muscle on your frame and a tan on your hide, if you’re not afraid of hard work. We sail at high tide.”

  Dith smiled, genuinely touched by the man’s gesture. “Thank you, that’s very kind, but I truly must reach Byrandia.”

  “But you can’t say why.” The captain nodded, clearly unconvinced but not willing to argue about it, and shook his hand. “Well, good luck to you. If you change your mind…”

  Dith tossed a coin to the barkeep and nodded back toward the captain. “Enjoy your ale.”

  Outside the tavern, Dith kicked angrily at the ground. He should have expected as much. Galorin had told him this would happen, and now the presence in his mind glowed with irritating smugness. The young mage clawed at the top of the scratchy close fitting doublet to loosen it at his throat, unaccustomed to the binding and the heat trapped by the heavy cloth.

  He could stow away on the ship––the Jenna Calera––and hijack it once it was safely out to sea. That was one possibility, though he did not like his chances of getting Glasada aboard without being noticed, and leaving his horse behind now that he finally had one was out of the question.

  At the hitching post outside the tavern, Glasada nickered softly, worriedly, and Dith rested a hand against him. Suddenly, the horse’s head turned sharply to look back along the road toward the gates where the gate captain and several of the guardsmen, some Hadrian, some Syonese, were running toward them. Dith calmly tied the rucksack to the saddle while he watched them, feeling an uncomfortable heat building within his clothing as his protections strengthened around him.

  “That’s he!” called the guard who had stopped him at the gate earlier. “That’s the one.”

  “You there!” The guard captain was shouting as he ran toward Dith. “Halt!”

  The mage looked the other way, toward the piers, plotting an escape route, and he swung himself up onto Glasada’s back.

  “Wait!” the captain called again. “Please!”

  Please.

  Dith looked down with a sigh. “Please” had gotten him into trouble before with Hadrians. But the captain’s colorless eyes looked desperate, genuinely fearful. Instead of riding away, Dith considered a moment, then swore under his breath and rode instead toward the guards, who by now were fairly winded. They’d run the better part of a mile betwe
en the gates and the dockside tavern where they’d found him, assuming they’d come a straight line rather than searching every street for him, and they were not in the kind of battle-ready shape they’d maintained during the war.

  “I am Captain Gran Barod of the Pyran Guard, and I would know this of you at once,” gasped the guard captain between labored breaths, looking worriedly over Dith’s clothing. “Are you truly a mage? No coy banter, no stories. Please. I need the truth.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Answer my question honestly, for our lives, I beg of you!” Captain Barod’s face was red, but not with exertion as much as with fear. He had clearly been warned about Dith’s eyes, and he tried not to look directly into them. “Are you really a mage, and one of power?”

  “Yes,” Dith answered calmly, watching relief flood over the body of guards. “Now answer my question.”

  The guard who had accosted him at the gate spoke up. “The ones who came through before? Those mages I told you of, as nearly destroyed Pyran as they left? They return, over the hills to the west. Our men in the towers spotted them coming this way, not three miles out. Not as many as came through before. It seems they took casualties along the way. But yet they come.”

  “Indeed they did take casualties. Not I, to go down without a fight. How fast are they coming? Do they port from mark to mark, or do they walk?”

  “Do you get any sense of urgency from them?”

  The guards shook their heads. “They seem intent, but not hurried. They walk briskly but yet they walk.”

  “As they were when they approached my keep. It could be they know we’re here, and they know we have no means of escape. Do you feel them on the strands?”