Kalten shuddered. ‘Wouldn’t it be sort of like taking up residence in a tomb?’
‘Not really. Time’s all one piece, Kalten. The past is always with us. The cave served the fellow who made this spearpoint very well, and the work he left behind inclines me to trust his judgement. The place has everything we need – shelter, water, plenty of firewood nearby, and then there’s that steep meadow a hundred yards off to the south, so there’s plenty of forage for the horses.’
‘What are we going to eat, though? After a couple of weeks when our supplies run out, we’ll be trying to boil rocks down for soup-stock.’
‘There’s game about, Sir Kalten,’ Khalad told him. ‘I’ve seen deer down by the river and a flock of feral goats higher up the slope.’
‘Goat?’ Kalten made a face.
‘It’s better than rock soup, isn’t it?’
‘Sir Ulath is right, gentlemen,’ Bevier told them. ‘The cave’s in a defensible position. So far as we know, the Delphae have to get close enough to touch us in order to do us any harm. Some breastworks and a wellplanted field of sharpened stakes on that steep slope leading down to the river will keep them at arm’s length. If Ambassador Itagne is right and the Delphae are pressed for time, that should encourage them to come to the bargaining table.’
‘Let’s do it,’ Vanion decided. ‘And let’s get right at it. The Delphae seem to come out at night, so we’ll want some defenses in place before the sun goes down.’
The overcast which had turned the sky into an oppressive leaden bowl for the past week was gone the following morning, and the autumn sunlight touching the turning leaves of the grove of aspens across the gorge from their cave filled the day with a vibrant, golden light. Everything seemed etched with a kind of preternatural clarity. The boulders in the stream-bed below were starkly white, and the swift-moving river was a dark, sun-illuminated green. The gorge was alive with bird song and the chatter of scolding squirrels.
The knights continued the labor of fortification, erecting a substantial, chest-high wall of loosely piled stones around the edge of the semi-circular shelf that extended out from the mouth of the cave, and planting a forest of sharpened stakes on the steep slope that led down to the river.
They pastured their horses in the adjoining meadow by day and brought them inside the makeshift fort as the sun went down. They bathed and washed their clothing in the river, and hunted deer and goats in the forest. They took turns standing watch at night, but there was no sign of the Delphae.
They stayed there for four nights, growing more restless with each passing hour. ‘If this is how the Delphae respond to something urgent, I’d hate to sit around waiting for them when they were relaxed,’ Talen said dryly to Itagne on the morning of the fourth day. ‘They don’t even have anybody out there watching us.’
‘They’re out there, Master Talen,’ Itagne replied confidently.
‘Why haven’t we seen them, then? They’d be fairly hard to miss at night.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Kalten disagreed. ‘I don’t think they glow all the time. We saw them shining out there in that fog the first time they came to call, but the second time they crept up to within twenty yards of us before they lit up. They seem to be able to control the light, depending on the circumstances.’
‘They’re out there,’ Itagne repeated, ‘and the longer they wait, the better.’
‘I didn’t follow that,’ Talen confessed.
‘They know by now that we’re not going to move from this spot, so they’re out there right now arguing among themselves about what they’re going to offer us. Some of them want to offer more than the others, and the longer we sit right here, the more we strengthen the position of that faction.’
‘Have you suddenly become clairvoyant, Itagne?’ Sephrenia asked him.
‘No, Lady Sephrenia, just experienced. This delay is fairly standard in any negotiation. I’m on familiar ground now. We’ve chosen the right strategy.’
‘What else should we be doing?’ Kalten asked.
‘Nothing, Sir Knight. It’s their move.’
She came from the river in broad daylight, climbing easily up the rocky path that ascended the steep slope. She wore a gray, hooded robe and simple sandals. Her features were Tamul, but she did not have the characteristic golden skin-tone of her race. She was not so much pale as she was colorless. Her eyes were gray and seemed very wise, and her hair was long and completely white, though she appeared to be scarcely more than a girl.
Sparhawk and the others watched her as she came up the hill in the golden sunlight. She crossed the steep meadow where the horses grazed. Ch’iel, Sephrenia’s gentle white palfrey, approached the colorless woman curiously, and the stranger gently touched the mare’s face with one slim hand.
‘That’s probably far enough,’ Vanion called to her. ‘What is it that you want?’
‘I am Xanetia,’ the young woman replied. Her voice was soft, but there was a kind of echoing timbre to it that immediately identified her as one of the Delphae. ‘I am to be thy surety, Lord Vanion.’
‘You know me?’
‘We know thee, Lord Vanion – and each of thy companions. Ye are reluctant to come to Delphaeus, fearing that we mean ye harm. My life will serve as pledge of our good faith.’
‘Don’t listen, Vanion,’ Sephrenia said, her eyes hard.
‘Art thou afeared, Priestess?’ Xanetia asked calmly. Thy Goddess doth not share thy fear. Now do I perceive that it is thy hatred which doth obstruct that which must come to pass, and thus it shall be into thy hands that I shall place my life – to do with as thou wilt. If thou must needs kill me to quench this hatred of thine, then so be it.’
Sephrenia’s face went deathly pale. ‘You know I wouldn’t do that, Xanetia.’
‘Then put the implement of death into the hands of another. Thus thou mayest command my dying and put no stain of blood upon thine own hands. Is this not the custom of thy race, Styric? Thou shalt remain undefiled – even as this thirst of thine is slaked. All unsmirched mayest thou face thy Goddess and protest thine innocence, for thou shalt be blameless. My blood shall be upon the hands of thine Elenes, and Elene souls are cheap, are they not?’ She reached inside her robe and drew out a jewel-like stone dagger. ‘Here is the implement of my death, Sephrenia,’ she said. ‘The blade is obsidian, so thou shalt not contaminate thy hands – or thy soul – with the loathsome touch of steel when thou spillest out my life.’ Xanetia’s voice was soft, but her words cut into Sephrenia like hard, sharp steel.
‘I won’t listen to this!’ the small Styric woman declared hotly.
Xanetia smiled. ‘Ah, but thou wilt, Sephrenia,’ she said, still very calm. ‘I know thee well, Styric, and I know that my words have burned themselves into thy soul. Thou wilt hear them again and again. In the silence of the night shall they come to thee, burning deeper each time. Truly shalt thou listen, for my words are the words of truth, and they shall echo in thy soul all the days of thy life.’
Sephrenia’s face twisted in anguish, and with a sudden wail she fled back into the cave.
Itagne’s face was troubled as he came back along the narrow path from the meadow to the open area in front of the cave. ‘She’s very convincing,’ he told them. ‘I get no sense of deceit from her at all.’
‘She probably doesn’t know enough about the real motives of the leaders of her people to have anything to hide,’ Bevier said doubtfully. ‘She could very well be nothing more than a pawn.’
‘She is one of the leaders of her people, Sir Bevier,’ Itagne disagreed. ‘She’s the equivalent of the crown princess of the Delphae. She’s the one who’ll be Anarae when the Anari dies.’
‘Is that a name or a title?’ Ulath asked.
‘It’s a title. The Anari – or in Xanetia’s case, the Anarae – is both the temporal and spiritual leader of the Delphae. The current Anari is named Cedon.’
‘She’s not just making it up?’ Talen asked. ‘She could be just pretending to b
e their crown princess, you know. That way, we’d think she was important, when she’s actually nothing more than a shepherdess or somebody’s housemaid.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Itagne said. ‘It may sound immodest, but I don’t really believe anyone can lie to me for very long and get away with it. She says that she’s the one who’ll be Anarae, and I believe her. The move’s consistent with standard diplomatic practice. Hostages have to be important. It’s another indication of just how desperate the Delphae are in this business. I think Xanetia’s telling the truth, and if she is, she’s the most precious thing they possess.’ He made a wry face. ‘It definitely goes against everything I’ve been trained to believe about the Shining Ones since childhood, but I think we almost have to trust them this time.’
Sparhawk and Vanion looked at each other. ‘What do you think?’ Vanion asked.
‘I don’t see that we’ve got much choice, do you?’
‘Not really. Ulath was right. We can’t sit here all winter, and no matter which way we turn, we keep going toward Delphaeus. The fact that Xanetia’s here is some assurance of good faith.’
‘Is it enough, though?’
‘It’s probably going to have to be, Sparhawk. I don’t think we’re going to get anything better.’
‘Kalten!’ Sephrenia exclaimed. ‘No!’
‘Somebody has to do it,’ the blond knight replied stubbornly. ‘Good faith has to go both ways.’ He looked Xanetia full in the face. ‘Is there something you’d like to tell me before I help you up onto that horse?’ he asked her. ‘Some warning, maybe?’
‘Thou art brave, Sir Kalten,’ she replied.
‘It’s what they pay me for.’ He shrugged. ‘Will I dissolve if I touch you?’
‘No.’
‘All right. You’ve never ridden a horse before, have you?’
‘We do not keep horses. We seldom leave our valley, so we have little need of them.’
‘They’re fairly nice animals. Be a little careful of the one Sparhawk rides, though. He bites. Now, this horse is a pack animal. He’s fairly old and sensible, so he won’t waste energy jumping around and being silly. Don’t worry too much about the reins. He’s used to following along after the others, so you don’t have to steer him. If you want him to go faster, nudge him in the ribs with your heels. If you want him to slow down, pull back on the reins a little bit. If you want him to stop, pull back a little harder. That pack saddle’s not going to be very comfortable, so let us know if you start getting stiff and sore. We’ll stop and get off and walk for a while. You’ll get used to it after a few days – if we’ve got that far to travel.’
She held out her hands, crossed at the wrist. ‘Wilt thou bind me now, Sir Knight?’
‘What for?’
‘I am thy prisoner.’
‘Don’t be silly. You won’t be able to hold on if your hands are tied.’ He set his jaw, reached out and took her by the waist. Then he lifted her easily up onto the patient pack horse. Then he held out his hands and looked at them. ‘So far so good,’ he said. ‘At least my fingernails haven’t fallen off. I’ll be right beside you, so if you feel yourself starting to slip, let me know.’
‘We always underestimate him,’ Vanion murmured to Sparhawk. ‘There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye, isn’t there?’
‘Kalten? Oh yes, my Lord. Kalten can be very complicated sometimes.’
They rode away from their fortified cave and followed the gorge the river had cut down through the rock. Sparhawk and Vanion led the way with Kalten and their hostage riding close behind them. Sephrenia, her face coldly set, rode at the rear with Berit, keeping as much distance as possible between herself and Xanetia.
‘Is it very far?’ Kalten asked the pale woman at his side. ‘I mean, how many days will it take us to get there?’
‘The distance is indeterminate, Sir Kalten,’ Xanetia replied, ‘and the time as well. The Delphae are outcast and despised. We would be unwise to make the location of the valley of Delphaeus widely known.’
‘We’re used to traveling, Lady,’ Kalten told her, ‘and we always pay attention to landmarks. If you take us to Delphaeus, we’ll be able to find it again. All we’d have to do is find that cave and start from there.’
‘That is the flaw in thy plan, Sir Knight,’ she said gently. ‘Thou couldst consume a lifetime in the search for that cave. It is our wont to conceal the approaches to Delphaeus rather than Delphaeus itself.’
‘It’s a little hard to conceal a whole mountain range, isn’t it?’
‘We noted that self-same thing ourselves, Sir Kalten,’ she replied without so much as a smile, ‘so we conceal the sky instead. Without the sun to guide thee, thou art truly lost.’
‘Could you do that, Sparhawk?’ Kalten raised his voice slightly. ‘Could you make the whole sky overcast like that?’
‘Could we?’ Sparhawk asked Vanion.
‘I couldn’t. Maybe Sephrenia could, but under the circumstances it might not be a good idea to ask her. I know enough to know that it’s against the rules, though. We’re not supposed to play around with the weather.’
‘We do not in truth cloud the sky, Lord Vanion,’ Xanetia assured him. ‘We cloud thine eyes instead. We can, an we choose, make others see what we wish them to see.’
‘Please, Anarae,’ Ulath said with a pained look, ‘don’t go into too much detail. You’ll bring on one of those tedious debates about illusion and reality, and I really hate those.’
They rode on with the now unobscured sun clearly indicating their line of travel. They were moving somewhat northeasterly.
Kalten watched their prisoner (or captor) closely, and he called a halt somewhat more frequently than he might normally have done. When they stopped, he helped the strange pale woman down from her horse and walked beside her as they continued on foot, leading their horses.
‘Thou art overly solicitous of my comfort, Sir Kalten,’ she gently chided him.
‘Oh, it’s not for you, Lady,’ he lied. ‘The going’s a bit steep here, and we don’t want to exhaust the horses.’
‘There’s definitely more to Kalten than I’d realized,’ Vanion muttered to Sparhawk.
‘You can spend a whole lifetime watching somebody, my friend, and you still won’t learn everything there is to know about him.’
‘What an astonishingly acute perception,’ Vanion said dryly.
‘Be nice,’ Sparhawk murmured.
Sparhawk was troubled. While Xanetia was certainly not as skilled as Aphrael, it was clear that she was tampering with time and distance in the same way the Child Goddess did. If she had maintained the illusion of an overcast sky, he might not have noticed, but the position of the sun clearly indicated that there were gaps in his perception of time. The sun does not normally jump as it moves across the sky. The troubling fact was not that Xanetia did it badly, but the fact that she did it at all. Sparhawk began to revise a long-held opinion. This ‘tampering’ was obviously not a purely divine capability. Itagne’s rather sketchy discourse on the Delphae had contained at least some elements of truth. There was indeed such a thing as ‘Delphaeic magic’, and so far as Sparhawk could tell, it went further and into areas where Styrics were unable or unwilling to venture.
He kept his eyes open, but did not mention his observations to his friends.
And then, on a perfect autumn evening, when the birds clucked and murmured sleepily in the trees and a luminous twilight turned the mountains purple around them, they rode up a narrow, rocky trail that wound around massive boulders toward a V-shaped notch high above. Xanetia had been most insistent that they not stop for the night, and she and Kalten had pressed on ahead. Her normally placid face seemed somehow alight with anticipation.
When she and her protector reached the top of the trail, they stopped and sat on their horses, starkly outlined against the last rosy vestiges of the sunset.
‘Dear God!’ Kalten exclaimed. ‘Sparhawk, come up and look at this!’
Sparhawk a
nd Vanion rode on up to join them.
There was a valley below, a steep, basin-like mountain valley with dark trees shrouding the slopes. There were houses down there, close-packed houses with candlelit windows and with columns of pale blue smoke rising straight up into the evening air from innumerable chimneys. The fact that there was a fair-sized town this deep in the inaccessible mountains was surprising enough, but Sparhawk and the others were not looking at the town.
In the very center of the valley, there was a small lake. There was, of course, nothing unusual about that. Lakes abound in mountains in all parts of the world. The spring run-off from melting snow inevitably seeks valleys and basins – any place that is lower than the surrounding terrain and from which there is no exit channel. It was not the fact that the lake was there that was so surprising. The thing that startled them and raised those vestigial hackles of superstitious awe along the backs of their necks was the fact that the lake glowed in the lowering twilight. The light was not the sickly, greenish glow of the phosphorescence that is sometimes exuded by rotting vegetable matter, but was instead a clear, steady white. Like a lost moon, the lake glowed, responding to the light of her new-risen sister standing above the eastern horizon.
‘Behold Delphaeus,’ Xanetia said simply, and when they looked at her, they saw that she too was all aglow with a pure white light that seemed to come from within her and which shone through her garment and through her skin itself as if that pale, unwavering light were coming from her very soul.
Chapter 14
Sparhawk’s senses were preternaturally acute for some reason, although his mind seemed detached and emotionless. He observed; he heard; he catalogued; but he felt nothing. The peculiar state was not an unfamiliar one, but the circumstances under which this profound calm had come over him were unusual – very unusual. There were no armed men facing him, and yet his mind and body were preparing for battle.
The Shining Ones Page 23