The Spirit Stone

by Katharine Kerr

  ‘Why?’ one of the women said. ‘Why would he do—’

  ‘Thievery, most likely,’ another woman said. ‘Didn’t you see how everything was all thrown around in there? Everyone knows that Val carries a lot of gemstones with her.’

  A memory began to rise in Valandario’s mind. Gemstones, Loddlaen wanting—

  ‘The black pyramid!’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go back to the tent!’

  ‘Not just yet.’ Enabrilia grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Let the others—’ She hesitated briefly. ‘Let the others finish what they’re doing in there.’

  ‘Do what?’ Val whispered. ‘You mean taking Jav away.’

  Enabrilia nodded. Valandario began to weep again, hugging herself and rocking back and forth like a child. When another woman brought in a clean tunic and leggings, Enabrilia helped Val out of her blood-soaked clothing and into the clean as if she really had been a child.

  ‘I’ve got to tell Aderyn,’ Valandario said. ‘He can’t just ride in and hear about this.’

  ‘Yes, he can,’ Enabrilia said. ‘I think it’ll be kinder, actually, to tell him about it to his face. We can all try to comfort him that way. It’s not long before dawn, anyway, so he’ll be here soon.’

  No one slept that night. Two and three at a time, the men rode back to camp to relay messages, then rode out again to resume searching. By dawn they’d all returned with the bad news that the search was hopeless. Although they’d sent out parties in all directions, Loddlaen and his stock had vanished, apparently without leaving a single hoof print on the ground.

  ‘He has dweomer, doesn’t he?’ Danalaurel said. ‘It’s no wonder we can’t find him.’

  With the pale light of day Valandario’s first flush of grief had spent itself. Danno’s remark reminded her that she had dweomer herself, more powerful than Loddlaen’s, and she tried scrying for him. She could see nothing, no matter how hard or how carefully she focused her inner vision.

  ‘He might have taken ship again,’ Valandario told the others. ‘I wonder if someone was waiting for him down at the coast. It’s only a few miles away.’

  At daybreak Valandario, Enabrilia, and two other women returned to her tent to sort through the tent bags and other possessions scattered around. Since Valandario couldn’t bear to remove them, the others packed up Javanateriel’s clothing and possessions. Val searched through the scattered goods left behind. As she worked, she carefully repacked each tent bag and hung it in its usual place to force her mind to do something besides mourn. She found that Loddlaen had left two handfuls of gemstones behind—a small fortune in gems, in fact—but sure enough, the black obsidian pyramid had disappeared with him.

  ‘Everything else is here,’ Valandario said at last. ‘As far as I can tell, anyway. My mind—I just can’t seem to think.’

  ‘Of course,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

  ‘I doubt it, but I’ll try.’

  Despite her doubt, as soon as she lay down, Valandario did fall asleep. She dreamt of Javanateriel. She saw him walking towards her, laughing at the jest he’d played on her. She berated him for pretending to die, but when he caught her hands, she forgave him—only to wake and remember that no, he truly had been murdered. She sat up, feeling that she might be sick at any moment, sure that the smell of his blood still lingered in the humid summer air. Enabrilia was sitting near by, watching her.

  ‘It’s noon,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Do you feel like coming outside?’

  ‘Yes,’ Valandario said. ‘I’ve got to have some fresh air.’

  They walked outside to find the camp oddly quiet. Children stayed close to their parents, who stood or sat in little groups, talking in subdued voices. Even the dogs had picked up the mood and lay near the tents with barely a wag of a tail or a whine.

  ‘They never found him,’ Enabrilia said. ‘Ah by the Black Sun! I wonder what his mother’s going to think of this, if we ever see her again to tell her about it, anyway. Dalla was my closest friend, you know, when we were girls. Thinking that her child—ah gods.’

  Distantly, at the edge of the camp, someone howled out the word ‘no’, followed by a long shriek of mingled rage and grief. Everyone turned to look in that direction.

  ‘I’ll wager that’s Aderyn,’ Valandario said. ‘Someone must have told him.’

  Aderyn came striding through the tents, his silver hair swept back from his face, his eyes dripping silent tears, his mouth set and grim. Everyone turned to watch him without speaking a word. When he saw Valandario, Aderyn stopped, then drew himself up to full height and hurried to meet her.

  ‘My poor child!’ Aderyn said. ‘My heart aches for you!’

  When he held out his arms, Valandario ran to him. She felt like a child, indeed, that young, frightened apprentice once more. Aderyn held her close and stroked her hair with one hand while she wept against him.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said through her sobs. ‘I don’t blame you.’

  They wept together while all around them the People stood watching. On the edge of the crowd someone began a mourning song, and slowly, a few at a time, the others joined in, until the entire camp chanted its grief.

  In the hot weather, the death ground at the Lake of the Leaping Trout lay too far north for his alar to take Javanateriel there for the last rites. The Deverry merchants and their men gave them every stick of firewood they’d brought along with them for the funereal pyre. The women in the alar wrapped Jav in a linen sheet and laid him on the pyre, then poured flasks of olive oil from Bardek over him and the wood. Before they lit that final fire, Valandario brought out the pair of wooden cups and tucked them one into each flaccid hand.

  The fire burned much of the night. With the dawn, when the ashes had cooled, Valandario let them scatter in the rising wind. As she watched them drifting away, she knew that she would never love another man, no matter how long the life ahead her.

  On a late afternoon that threatened rain, Nevyn was digging up comfrey roots out in a fallow pasture when he felt Aderyn’s mind reaching out to his. He lay down his trowel, sat back on his heels, and used the gathering grey clouds as a scrying focus. When Aderyn told him about the murder, Nevyn was so shocked, so bitterly surprised, that for a moment he could say nothing at all. Finally he found words.

  ‘I never ever thought Loddlaen would do such a thing,’ Nevyn said. ‘Never in a thousand years!’

  ‘I can’t tell you how it gladdens my heart to hear you say that,’ Aderyn said. ‘I’ve been berating myself, thinking I should have known what he was capable of.’

  ‘Don’t! The Loddlaen we knew wasn’t capable of it. Besides, do you really think he intended to kill Jav? It sounds to me like he panicked when Jav came into the tent.’

  ‘So I thought, too. From what Val told me, one of the Guardians was mixed up in this as well—Alshandra, most likely.’

  ‘Worse and worse! Why would she have wanted the obsidian piece?’

  ‘I have no idea. The message from Evandar in it, mayhap? Or maybe to allow one of her worshippers to travel in her country the same way Dalla did, all those years ago.’

  Nevyn felt old grief troubling Aderyn’s mind. It took some time before Aderyn could continue.

  ‘If only I had seen,’ Aderyn said. ‘If only I’d seen what you saw, all those years ago.’

  ‘You couldn’t have. Now, look, you told me that Val doesn’t blame you. Well and good, then. Don’t you blame yourself, either.’

  ‘My thanks.’

  The words reached Nevyn on a wave of sincere gratitude. With them he felt the breach between him and Aderyn, caused all those years ago by Morwen’s death, finally close and heal.

  ‘What hurts me the most,’ Aderyn continued, ‘was the way he wormed himself into Val’s trust, telling her he’d come to see me, and all the time he was planning on stealing the gem. I suppose he dragged me into it in order to punish me somehow. I was so happy, thin
king he’d come home at last.’

  ‘I was wondering about that, not that I wanted to say it first.’ That little viper! Nevyn thought to himself alone. If I ever get hold of him –

  ‘Well, now he’s gone,’ Aderyn said. ‘Probably to Bardek. Doubtless I’ll never see him again.’

  ‘Oh, don’t believe that,’ Nevyn said. ‘He’ll come back to Deverry one day. I’m sure of it. He’s set forces in motion that will drag him back, and he’ll want to take out his rage on you again, if naught else.’

  ‘Perhaps so. If he does, it’ll be up to me to deal with him, too. I’m torn in half, hoping he does come back but wishing he’d stay away forever.’

  Aderyn sounded so exhausted that Nevyn said nothing more that afternoon but comforting platitudes. He mulled the situation over in his mind for days, however. He knew with the wordless surety of a great master of magic that dark dweomer lurked somewhere on the fringes of Loddlaen’s life. Exactly where and how he couldn’t know—not yet. He could only watch and wait for him to come back to Deverry. His own kind will draw him, Nevyn thought. Ai! None of us ever dreamt that there was so much hatred in the lad!

  From time to time during his unnaturally long life, Nevyn had to leave whatever place he’d been living in and relocate somewhere else. If he stayed in one home too long, the local folk would have noticed that he was living for far too many years. That summer, after the murder, Nevyn left Cannobaen. He travelled north-east, heading for Cantrae province and his hidden dwelling in Brin Toraedic. He stopped in Cerrmor, however, when he received an obscure hint from the Lords of Wyrd that someone of great interest happened to be there.

  Although the Lords of Wyrd were once ordinary human beings, they have evolved so far, and live on such an exalted plane of existence, that communicating in words lies beyond them. All they can do is send hints, intuitions, odd twists of feeling and thought—the sort of thing men call omens—down to the dweomermasters who live so far below. Nevyn interpreted this particular omen as meaning that Lilli or Morwen had been reborn in Cerrmor. Unfortunately, he’d misread the intent, though not the impulse.

  On his second day there, Nevyn turned onto a street leading to the docks and noticed a stout fellow walking ahead of him – a successful merchant, judging by the brightly checked wool of his brigga and the heavy embroidery on his fine linen shirt. At a tavern door the fellow turned in, pausing to glance back. Nevyn received the impression of a typical Cerrmor man, with a broad face, blue eyes, and thick pale hair, but the impression was all he got, because the fellow blanched, ducked, and practically leapt into the tavern. Nevyn glanced behind him and saw no one on the street. It must have been me who frightened him, Nevyn thought. I wonder who he is? He hurried over to the tavern door, but when he looked in, he found no sign of the fellow except the swinging of the back door, as if someone had rushed out and flung it closed behind him.

  Nevyn trotted through the tavern and out the back, but he saw only empty ale barrels and a dungheap in the narrow alley. With a shrug he went on his way, but for the rest of his time in Cerrmor, he kept on guard in hopes of seeing the mysterious merchant again. He never did, and no more could he place the fellow among the crowded memories of his unnaturally prolonged life. Once he even remembered Tirro, the shifty-eyed little wastrel of a merchant’s son, but he never equated the two—which was a great pity, because many years later, that sight of a grown, prosperous, and utterly corrupt Tirro, or Alastyr to give him his full name, would have stood him in good stead.

  Eventually his search for those souls to whom he owed debts of wyrd made Nevyn forget about the mysteriously frightened stranger. After wandering the kingdom for some years in the hopes of finding Lilli and Morwen reborn, he returned to Eldidd and the small town of Cannobaen. He decided he’d stay there, too, until the Lords of Wyrd sent him an omen that indicated otherwise. Not even such a powerful dweomermaster as he could realize, however, just how right his choice was, nor could he know that hundreds of years later he would be reborn on the western border at a time when its folk would stand in the gravest peril they had ever faced.

  PART II

  The Westlands 1159

  The spiral, not the circle, is the key to the fulfilment of Wyrd.

  The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

  In a pair of old man’s hands, the black stone glittered. They sat inside a tent, and soft voices talked incomprehensibly as Evan—he knew his real name was Evan—stared into the stone. In the black glow a man with daffodil-yellow hair and cherry-red lips held out a white flat thing with a picture of a black lizard upon it. Or was it a raven?

  Salamander woke suddenly with the dream vivid in his mind. He sat up on the bed and ran his hands through his sweaty hair while he stared at the braided rushes covering the floor. He reminded himself that he was sitting in a chamber in the Red Wolf dun, not in a Westfolk tent. After a few good yawns, he rose and went to the window. Down below in the ward servant lasses were carrying baskets from the cookhouse into the great hall. On the far side of the ward he could see grooms leading horses to the watering trough. The dun had woken for the day.

  Salamander dressed, ready to go down for breakfast, but he lingered in the chamber, thinking over the dream, trying to dissect its residue. The obsidian pyramid was calling to him. He could understand it no other way than that the stone was trying to reach him. He sat down on the bed and considered the stripe of sunlight while he let his mind reach out to the stone.

  In vision he saw the obsidian pyramid standing upon an altar beside an oil lamp. The pyramid glowed with its strange black light—a spirit, he suddenly realized, was indwelling the gem. Nothing else would explain the glow and the bright black sparks that occasionally flashed from its surface. What sort of spirit? With the Sight as his only tool the answer lay beyond him. He widened the vision. He could clearly discern the stone altar, the oil lamp, and behind both, a painting of Alshandra in the Bardek manner. Beyond, he saw only a misty void, hiding the rest of Alshandra’s Inner Shrine.

  Scrying out Zakh Gral made him think of Rocca. Instantly his vision jumped to daylight and the Outer Shrine. Rocca was leaning over the rough stone outer altar, scrubbing it with a handful of rags. On the ground beside her sat a bucket of water. The job would make every muscle in her torso ache. She’d be glad of the pain, he supposed, because she’d see it as yet another sacrifice to her goddess. Nearby stood one of the Gel da’ Thae priestesses, waving her hands while she spoke. Rocca paused in her cleaning to listen, her face grave, almost troubled. Salamander wished for the thousandth time that he could hear while scrying, but only the greatest masters of the dweomer could manage that.

  Rocca began talking. The Gel da’ Thae woman listened intently, then suddenly smiled, showing her teeth, filed to sharp points in the Horsekin manner. She seemed deeply relieved about whatever problem had brought her to her fellow priestess. Rocca patted her on the shoulder, as if to comfort her. The other woman nodded, then walked away. Rocca returned to her work.

  And Sidro—where was she? The Sight took him flying upriver to the forest edge. Rocca had led him out of the forest at just that point, or so he remembered, following the same road that Sidro now walked in the opposite direction. She was trudging along in her painted leather dress with a blanket tied around her waist for a skirt and a bulging sack of supplies over one shoulder. She walked with her head down as if she were already profoundly weary with the journey just begun.

  In the sunlight her cropped hair shone like a raven’s wing. He noticed for the first time that the back of her neck bore a string of green tattoos. Those and the width of her shoulders, her oddly round eyes, the strong modelling of her features – ye gods! he thought. I’ll wager there’s Horsekin blood in her veins! He focused in closer and saw that she was weeping. She raised her head and looked up at the sky while tears ran down her cheeks, a gesture that cost her when she stumbled over a rock in the path. She stopped, dropped her sack, and covered her face with her hands while she sobbed, her shoulders s
haking from the pain of bare flesh meeting stone.

  He pitied her. His involuntary stab of compassion surprised him so badly that he nearly lost the vision then and there, but he managed to stay focused for a few moments more, until she suddenly lowered her hands and twisted around to look behind her. Her tear-streaked face showed panic as she looked this way and that, just as if she knew someone watched her.

  Salamander broke the vision fast. He sat still for a few moments, staring out at nothing, then tried to stand. The chamber swelled and swirled around him so violently that he nearly lost consciousness. Eventually his physical sight steadied down, but the stones of the chamber seemed to be breathing, a hundred swellings and flattenings of little lungs.

  ‘Star goddesses help me!’ he whispered aloud. He wanted to contact Dallandra, but he was suddenly afraid of using any dweomer at all.

  A sound struck the chamber door from outside. He cocked his head to one side, puzzled, but when it sounded again he realized that someone was knocking.

  ‘Who is it?’ Salamander called out.

  ‘Neb. Are you ill or suchlike?’

  ‘I’m not. The door isn’t barred. Come in.’

  Neb pushed open the door and walked in, stood looking down at him with his hands on his hips. ‘You look ill,’ he said.

  ‘Do I? Well, most likely it’s just the heat of the summer’s day. I didn’t sleep well last night.’

  ‘Then you’d best get out of this chamber, hadn’t you? It’s sweltering in here.’

  ‘Splendid idea! Have I missed breakfast?’

  ‘You’ve not. The lasses are just setting it out.’

  After a bowl of porridge and a chunk of fresh bread and butter, Salamander felt his normal self. Still, he reminded himself that Dallandra had been right as usual. He needed to limit his scrying and to refrain from any other dweomer workings—unless some crisis demanded them.