They moved into near range, but Lord Aristide made no attempt to draw shield, to establish any kind of magical protection. Calculated good sense, since he had a fair chance of countering anything thrown at him, and risked provoking attack by displaying his defences. Descending a little short of the vanguard of the search took them down beside a group of eight men and women wearing the grey and black of Darien swear-swords.
"My Lord Aristide." The rangy blond woman wearing a lieutenant's badge sounded purely relieved as Aristide tugged loose his flight mask and surveyed their surroundings. They were standing atop a flat rock where the river tumbled over a six foot fall. Most of the search party was spread over the two tiers below, but just across the fast, narrow river was a cluster of ten people in the process of hauling a corpse from the water.
"Couerveur."
The speaker was a woman: compact and vigorous, her clothing spoke wealth while a touch of grey speared through gold-brown curls framing pale eyes. Her face was set, mouth a flat line and, even over the rush and gurgle of the river, tight anger was clear in that single, clipped word. Something about her reminded Gentian of her father. Loss. But where Gentian's father mourned his daughter's absence with quiet sorrow, black pain was pent in this woman's blue eyes.
"Queen Myentra."
This, then, was the Queen of Ceria, come to search the Galassas for the body of her child. Aristide's own voice had held none of her hostility, but little sympathy either. He crossed to the nearest point of the riverbank, his attention on the limp wet form between the feet of two Cyan guardsmen. It was the body of a long, lean man clothed in a saffron shift, his dark skin battered purple. Atlaran.
"Is this the first?"
"The first?" Queen Myentra echoed. "By the Moon, Couerveur–"
"Yes, this is the first."
The speaker, blunt and businesslike, was a man in the green and tan uniform of the Saxan guard, though his accent was Eastern. There were shadows of strain beneath dark eyes and his narrow face was stubbled. He touched a hand to his brow in neutral salute.
"This is Kenetet Vye," said another of the group. An Atlaran woman, elongated and magnificent, wearing the robes and strapping of the imperial honour guard. She stooped and brushed her fingers against the corpse's shaved skull, tracing the crescent of the Moon. "Body servant to the ambassador."
A tiny cough from a grey-haired man with a Cyan way of dress. "There has been, also, some wreckage." His tone was apologetic, as if he pointed out some social solecism. "Fragments, carried on the current. It is what led us upstream, against all logic. We have cast again and again for their location, but these mountains...well." His hands sketched a kind of pitying forbearance. "I understand it is quite the tradition to become lost in these parts."
Queen Myentra took a restive step forward, casting a glare of obvious dislike at the Cyan before facing down Aristide once again. The set of her jaw was pugnacious. "I would have an explanation for this, Couerveur. What excuse can you give for this attack?"
Gentian was not alone in paying close attention to Aristide's response. Darest's relationship with the Western Kingdoms was characterised by the Western monarchs being a little too pleased to see a once-great power struggling, probing weakened defences with increasing avidity. Darest had long enjoyed the tenuous protection of its connection with the empire of the Fair, but this fantastic disappearance might actually unify the fractious West into an invasion. To prevent that, Darest would have to walk a tightrope between soothing suspicion and not exposing its throat.
Aristide Couerveur looked away from the tableau on the opposite bank and studied the tumble of the Galassas River. His gaze roved to vertical walls cut into the dark mountain rock, where ferns clung damply in a mist of water spray. Then the foothills that grew beyond, ever more jagged, reaching lofty slopes patterned white. Superbly indifferent to an impatient audience, to the dripping corpse, to any notion of appeasement. Those fine-cut lips, whose subtle shifts Gentian was increasingly enjoying, curled minutely at both corners.
It was a slap in the face, deliberate and precisely underscored. A proclamation that Aristide was a Darien on Darien soil, one called on for assistance and greeted with discourtesy. Never mind what the West had lost, what they suspected, what forces they could bring to bear: they had best remember their manners.
And it worked. The Queen looked taken aback, swallowed an initial response, then adopted a tone of reluctant conciliation. "If you please, Couerveur. We would appreciate any aid or guidance you can offer in this. If there is any light you can shed on this situation, we would be glad to hear it."
Again, that tiny shift of lips. A fuller curve this time, to signify approval, a kind of 'well done' of the sort a teacher would offer a laggard pupil who finally grasps a lesson. It was masterful, shifting control of the scene firmly into Aristide's hands, relegating searchers to the role of petitioners and never-you-minding the question of numbers and justifiable outrage. Gentian supposed it would be taken amiss if she applauded.
"I am told that a burst of power was detected yesterday morning, some short way into the mountains." Aristide employed a blandly informative tone. "I suggest that seeking out the source would be more productive than collecting your barge piecemeal. We will follow the course of the river from the air."
This plan of action was eagerly adopted, and the four disparate groups on the opposite bank turned to relaying orders to the rest of the searchers. Aristide, his tall apprentice dogging his elbow, turned to the Darien soldiery waiting his orders and asked for details of those missing.
"Too many, M'Lord," the woman in charge replied, standing up very straight. "It was one of the grand barges and there were more than thirty on board. The Atlaran ambassador. The Saxan Crown Prince, his brother and entourage. The current Cyan Crown Prince, Jurasel, as well as the eldest Cyan princess, her wife and their children. The Cerian Crown Princess, a couple of cousins and hangers-on. Each group had a limited number of attendants and at least one guard. Also a small crew."
Gentian turned away, dangling her helmet by its straps as she watched the Atlarans carrying away the remains of the ambassador's body servant. She wondered if it was at all likely that the ambassador was not in a similar condition. The Arachol would not appreciate losing one of his emissaries, and she did not like to examine the idea of the Atlaran imperial temperament turned on Darest. Atlarus was less likely than most to flinch from the idea of offending The Deeping.
Closing her eyes, Gentian shifted her internal attention to the place, to the mountains themselves. They had a distinct presence, but mountains usually did. She'd rarely encountered a mountain that didn't watch, didn't lean ponderous attention on any who ventured its slopes. These did not welcome, but it was an attitude without any overt hostility. Rather, she felt as if she stood before a group of giants, shoulder to shoulder, a living wall. A blocking stance, weighty rejection without malice. No, they said. Go away.
Something was wound through this, an insubstantial thing Gentian's mind interpreted as a trace of scent. Or a faltering thread of light, a glinting secret sewn through fractured rock, marking a path, whispering. This way. Over here.
Puzzled, she opened her eyes and looked at the channel the river had cut into the slopes ahead.
"Are you familiar with the Skorese, Magister Calder?"
Aristide Couerveur stood at her elbow, watching her face as she had watched his. She wondered what his ear for power was like, and if he was sensitive enough to touch the places he travelled.
"I've travelled the far foothills," she replied, and gave him a sideways glance. "Family expeditions hunting out interesting plants. But Goldenrod tends to keep clear of the mountains proper. My twice great grandmother supposedly got herself lost when she was a girl. The usual story – abandoned all sense of direction and ran in circles. Mist and clouds and divinations making nonsense of themselves. They call them the Veiled Mountains in Dwyallin."
He shifted his gaze back to the ranked peaks. "There's a strong
keep-away, well-documented, focusing on the northern mountains. The mines just east of here aren't troubled, nor are larger expeditions. Thorough exploration has been made of the entire range. There's nothing to be found."
"I've not heard of barge-loads of people vanishing before."
"No. What do you see on the river?"
Sharp creature, to read her that well. Gentian could usually keep her thoughts to herself. Or perhaps he merely remembered her parentage, and was wise enough to ask.
"A lure? Some kind of marker? Recently worked power, though not laid down today."
"Footprints?"
He meant betraying signs inadvertently left by a casting mage. "It could be. But it seems more deliberate."
"Then be wary of traps."
Gentian nodded absently, thinking of the fetch. She might not have a horde of enemies on her own account, but she was being pulled into someone else's schemes. She'd best not let herself be dragged under.
ooOoo
The Galassas flowed in stages from a lake high in the heart of the mountains, carving its way through the southern foothills before spreading and slowing as it ran toward the sea. A pool the maps noted as the Cauldron lay at the point where the river tumbled from the shoulder of Mount Hestas to the lower hills. Twin falls thundered to either side of a block shaped like the prow of a massive ship, churning the water of the pool to a swirling frenzy before it finally escaped in another cascade.
The search party settled on the wide rim of the Cauldron to either side of the outfall. No-one spoke. What could be said before so much death?
The barge itself was partly intact, jammed up against the outfall so that the water had to surge to the rim to squeeze around it. This plug kept the debris, the pieces of clothing and personal belongings – and the bodies – trapped in the pool's violent whirl.
They were naked. Gentian didn't understand that, and paused in confusion while people began to speak to each other in shocked little murmurs. They'd hardly all be sleeping bare, certainly not the crew. No. Stripped by the force of water alone.
"Blood magic?"
It was the Easterner in the uniform of Sax, grim and blunt. A handful of voices immediately responded in the negative, and Gentian shook her head in her own denial. Whatever else this was, the power of these deaths had not been wrought into some casting. There was no stink of that kind of atrocity.
Nor would it make any sense: to have lifted that great hefty river-barge and brought it long miles upriver and dropped it here – smashed it, by all appearances, against that prow-like rock – would require an immense amount of power, beyond a single caster. Even the deaths of mages, princes, would scarcely compensate for the cost.
Not that Gentian could produce a better explanation.
"What then?" The Queen of Ceria, now stark with loss confirmed. "Why has this been done?"
"Simple murder?" The Cyan mage, in a most colourless tone.
"Nothing simple about this." The anger had gone of out the Cerian Queen, and the look she turned on Aristide was one of appeal. "I can't grasp this, Couerveur. Does someone move against the West?"
"I have no answer for you, Majesty. Not yet." Aristide was considering the tangled wreckage below as if it were a game-board, and a move had been made that did not fit to rule. "Closer investigation might make matters clearer." His blue-white gaze lifted, and he said with a civility which left aside past skirmishes: "Then we will recover the bodies."
The cluster of searchers who had been mage enough to fly the course of the river gathered together and began to discuss divinations. Gentian ignored them, curling down to wrap her arms about her knees and stare at the froth of water and flesh while she carefully sorted all that her senses were telling her.
That thread of power still teased the edge of perception, whispering This Way straight into a wall of rock. Dark marks scored the lichen there, sole sign of the impact of solid wood. The mountains lowered, close and disapproving. A few dozen castings made background chatter, ranging in strength from Aristide's saecstra to little vanity castings to keep clothes clean and make mages prettier. She tracked three or four sturdy enchantments in the water below, attached to objects tumbling in the lower currents.
The deaths were star-bursts, just beginning to fade. Some clustered on the far side of the pool before the prow, but most below. They'd survived the impact, fallen with the barge into the water, and drowned.
"Feeling sick?"
Lord Aristide's apprentice, Aspen, mixing curiosity with concern as he bent down beside her. She had yet to quite work the man out. He seemed powerful enough, but was old to have not been passed up at least to the journeyman level, Maja.
"Were none of them mages?" she asked. Rhetorical question. Gentian knew full well that the Cyan princess at least was true-mage, and odds were the others as well. Royalty and mage-craft were an almost sure admixture as power sought power.
"Well, of course some of them were!" Aspen replied, giving her a sharp look. "Crown Prince Jurasel and Princess Kestia. Most of the other royals I should think."
Gentian nodded. "Can you feel the deaths?" she asked.
Uncertainty now on those clean-cut features. Perhaps wondering if her mind was touched. But he nodded. "Yes." His voice dropped. "How can I not? Like scars on the skin of the place."
It was a good description, much better than the usual ripples-in-a-pond metaphor. "Death leaves claw-marks," she said, glancing past the apprentice to where his master had stopped speaking and turned. "Punctures in this world, little implosions of living magic as Lady Moon takes back her own."
"That is what we see here." It was the Atlaran guardswoman, looking down from her great height. But the shadow of comprehension had touched her face and she frowned out at the seething pool.
Gentian nodded, and encountered the apprentice's confusion again. "You see a lot of death in Atlarus," she explained. "All that public duelling, the honour battles. You can taste it for days, and this is very much what I would expect to feel if a random group of people had died here yesterday morning."
"But not mages." Aristide, gone very still indeed.
"No." She closed her eyes, searching again and finding nothing which fit. "Mages, true-mages who die, pull on arcane magic in reflex, and warp great gouts of it. They imprint their deaths on the world. You can feel it for weeks after. Years, in certain circumstances."
She stood at last, feeling the protest of her knees, and met the assembled hope and disbelief of four kingdom's searchers.
"If there were true-mages on that barge, and they died, they didn't do it here."
Chapter Five
"Kidnapping then."
Her Bluntness, the Cerian Queen, had broken the stretched-taut silence. All gruff and business still, but her eyes shone, and the whole way she stood had changed, shouting relief, precious hope. Aspen liked her the more for it, though from all accounts her relationship with her daughter was no display of matched minds.
"Who could have the power for it? Or the reason?" This from the Easterner playing Saxan guardsman, looking uneasy among his betters.
"Skrem?"
The chief of the Cyan mages dropped the word into play with a kind of distasteful dusting of his fingers. It produced a most interesting effect, a kind of stifled exchange of glances that went beyond the usual attitude that all Skremman were marginally less pleasant company than a well-shaken sackful of snakes. Aspen hadn't heard anything tasty about Skrem for months, not since they'd buried their last monarch and started the long-winded search for the next. Say what you would about the Rathen Rose: at least it had managed succession without periodically sending an entire country on a frantic treasure hunt.
The Diamond, with a superb failure to acknowledge any undercurrents, turned back to contemplation of the Cauldron. "If this is a kidnapping, the trail has already cooled. Perhaps speculation can be postponed until the preliminary investigation has been made?"
That got them moving again, and left Aspen caught between hover
ing uselessly in the background and attempting his own divinations. He had the basic ones by heart, but would achieve nothing sullying already muddy waters with low-level casting. Better to concentrate on the physical, to search about for subtle clues. He had already added to his list of ambitions the opportunity to produce some devastating statement which would make everyone gape at him, amazed.
But the thrill of adventure had been cut sharply by the discovery of the barge. Aspen couldn't quite recapture the same sense of excitement, for all he searched diligently about the immediate area, peering into whatever nook or cranny came to hand, and studying with particular care anything that might hold a footprint. But whenever he turned his head he would catch a glimpse of an arm, an elbow, a sleek, wet flank. A wreckage of people.
Quite against his best intentions, he found himself close to the upper fall, staring back down into the pool. The bowl of the Cauldron was not entirely smooth, and every so often one of the tumbling figures would strike a rock or a fragment of barge. He wondered if, left long enough, there would remain only pieces. A kind of soup.
"They'll take them out soon."
The little gardening mage, standing at his elbow like some spirit conjured by discomfort. Aspen decided that spooky, wide-eyed gaze had to at least in part be deliberately cultivated.
"And put them where?" he asked. "Keep them how?" He looked about at vertical black rock, broken irregularly by clumps of grass and something heathery. Damp, deserted and unwelcoming: no frame for mourning. A feeling of acute distress threatened to embarrass Aspen, and he combated it by gazing across the Cauldron at the Diamond's glorious profile: a sight to settle any amount of nerves.
Bones of the Fair Page 4