Owlknight

by Mercedes Lackey

  It was not an impulsive decision to abandon his examination and switch his focus; he was tired, yes, but this was something that needed to be looked at. The “nearer” he drew to the place, the more obvious it became that whatever was here, it didn’t belong. There was nothing “wrong” as such - nothing that a Healing-Mage needed to put right - but this thing that had caught his attention was as obvious as a cabbage in a flowerbed. It was out of place - it had neither been born of this soil, nor had it been brought here long enough ago that some of the sense of it permeated the land around it. It was rawly new, stubbornly unintegrated.

  He drew near enough to “see” its shape and form, clearly. Ah, now, what is this? It was a Change-Circle, all right, but the kind where territory was transported whole. What made it stand out was its sterility - and it was nothing but bare rock, so bare that not even moss grew on it. It had been planted in a scooped-out area of Pelagiris Forest. Tree roots did not penetrate it, though surface vegetation had spilled over onto it from erosion of the surrounding soil. Its surface was not level. In fact, it tilted slightly as a whole, like the side of a shallow hill scooped out by a massive ladle and dropped. The curvature of the stone carried true into the softer ground it had sunken into, and for the first time Darian had evidence that the Change-Circles were not circles at all, but spheres.

  Huh! I wonder what those theory builders back in Haven will make of this?

  He was about to leave the search altogether when something else caught his attention, very like the glint of sun on something small, but shiny and glittering amidst dark tangles of ground and greenery -

  Only in this case, it was a faint calling of like-to-like. Or more accurately, of blood-to-blood. His blood, answering the faint call of blood that he shared - weak, old, but unmistakable - so faint that he had to clear his senses again and refocus. He fed it a wisp of power to reenergize it and make it more easily recognizable for what it was.

  He had just found a possible first trace - the first sign - of his parents’ fate!

  He hardly slept at all that night; only good sense and the need to replenish the energy he’d spent kept him quiet after he’d burst out with his news to his traveling companions.

  Knowing he would not sleep, he simply kept quiet and allowed his body to rest, although his mind refused to. He carefully catalogued all the possible things he could find, and made a simple plan for what he would do for each possibility. It was the equivalent of counting sheep - the only equivalent his emotions would tolerate at this point. At least he had the illusion of accomplishing something to comfort him. . . .

  He dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion at some point, for the next thing he knew, Wintersky was shaking him awake and the stars were fading in the first light of predawn. They packed up the camp together and saddled Jonti and Larak, whose tails were twitching with suppressed energy and excitement. He and Wintersky planned to eat in the saddle, for Wintersky had brought journey-rolls for just that purpose. So they were on their way to the spot he had marked out, riding the dyheli and followed in the trees by their birds before the first hint of sun appeared in the sky.

  He rode in a kind of fever, afire to be there, that very moment; wanting to hope, afraid to do anything of the sort. He couldn’t even think, not really; his mind jumped from one thought to another without any real coherence. Kuari picked up his agitation, and flew back and forth, surging ahead of them, then swooping to the rear to check on their backtrail.

  If it had been remotely possible to Gate there, Darian would have tried. During the entire interminable journey, his stomach churned, the muscles in his shoulders and neck were in knots, and his mouth was as dry as sand.

  Their goal was as clear to outward eyes as it was to his inward senses. It loomed up, enfolded in the white haze of early morning low fog around its base as if it had shrugged off a mantle of clouds. A huge, perfectly spherical piece of gray-white rock, easily the size of his ekele or larger, reared up between the trunks of the trees ahead of them. The moment they spotted it, the dyheli went from their lope into a full-out gallop, leaving Darian and Wintersky to hang onto the handles built into the saddles and stay on as best they could.

  The dyheli skidded to a halt as they reached the artifact, hips slewing a little sideways with the momentum of their run as they dug in their hooves, and Darian leaped from the saddle the moment they came to a halt.

  The surface of the rock was perfectly smooth. Darian tentatively put out his hand to touch it, and the rock beneath his hand might as well have been perfectly polished by a jeweler.

  “It’s amazing. Look at this, Wintersky. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  But he had no thought for how that unusually smooth finish might have happened; what he wanted was on the opposite side of the boulder. He hurried around it to search in the grass at the junction of forest floor and rock. “It’s near here,” Darian murmured. “I felt the sign from near here, on the northwest side of the rock formation. In the soil.”

  Wintersky joined him, the two of them kneeling side by side and carefully parting the grass stems, pulling apart the leaf litter and dead vegetation of so many years, sifting through decayed grasses and earth for some tiny artifact -

  Then, Darian’s fingers tingled as he touched something small and hard under the surface.

  He stopped dead for a moment - then slowly, carefully, probed at the object, fishing it up out of the moist, crumbling soil. His breath caught.

  It was a bone; a tiny bone no larger than a thimble.

  Now Wintersky took over, pushing Darian aside gently, and hunting carefully and methodically through the loam. Darian went to the dyheli who had followed them to this side of the rock. He pulled his ground-cloth out of his pack and spread it out beside Wintersky, numbly taking what Wintersky dug up, cleaning it meticulously with spit and a handkerchief, and laying it out on the ground-cloth. Of all the things that he had imagined last night, this was not one of them.

  “Lay them out in the order I give them to you,” Wintersky ordered after the third tiny bone emerged from the soil. He excavated the site meticulously, using the tip of his knife as well as his fingers, after cutting a square of turf going back to the rock and pulling it up. Darian obeyed him, and piece by piece, bone by bone, a pattern began to emerge.

  Bones flared at each tiny joint, then nestled into the longer ones of the same general shape; bones gone gray-white from weathering, the surface cracked and pitted. Wintersky worked more slowly now, and there was a pattern to his excavation as he worked out the direction that the bones lay.

  They were toes.

  The heel - the ankle bones - then -

  Right against the rock, flush with it, the joint end of the lower leg bones. But the rest of the bone had been sheared off cleanly, leaving only the rounded ends, with the cuts lying flat against the surface of the rock.

  Slowly, Wintersky picked up the two bone fragments, cleaned them off, and handed them to Darian, cut-end first, so that Darian could see for himself that the ends had not been crushed, as they would have been had the boulder landed after a fall, upon the unfortunate owner of the foot.

  Another few minutes and the remains of a hard boot heel and sole were excavated from rotted tatters of thick canvas.

  - Father - He knew that must be whose foot they had found; he had somehow known it the moment he touched the first bone. He knew it from the lurch in his heart, the dryness of his mouth, the surge in his blood. His father always wore his boots to sleep in, in case there was trouble in the night. He wore canvas-bodied boots coated in the same neutral wax as his leggings, so he would not leave scent marks to warn the game. The waxing had to be restored every few weeks or it would let the canvas rot. This had to be his father’s -

  - but the ends of the bone were shiny, polished, as if they had been cut by a fine saw, then polished by a jeweler.

  “Check with Mage-Sight. Is there any more sign?” Wintersky asked diffidently, laying the two bones down with the rest wh
en Darian did not take them.

  Darian closed his eyes, extended his senses, and - shook his head. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely, surprised at the sound of his own voice.

  Together they looked at the bones, at the incontrovertible evidence that lay before them.

  There was only one possible interpretation.

  “They must have been caught in the Change-Circle,” Darian whispered. He did not for a moment doubt that his mother had been with his father - otherwise she would have made her way back to him. “They were caught in the Circle, and sent - where?”

  Wintersky could only shake his head. “I don’t know, Dar’ian,” he replied. “I just - don’t know.”

  A few hours later, Darian had cause to bless the caution with which Wintersky had worked, for he had managed to preserve the very few representatives of non-native vegetation that had taken root around the boulder. How they had come there, Darian had no idea, but they were not part of the normal flora of the Pelagiris Forest. Perhaps seeds had drifted in with the air that had come with the rock - perhaps they had been caught in a crack at the top of the boulder, for he had discovered by climbing up on top of it that it wasn’t perfectly sheared off. The top, flattened and cracked, looked like normally aged rock surface.

  He carefully and reverently folded away the bones in one of his shirts in the saddlebag. He wasn’t altogether certain how they could be of use - but Firesong would know.

  Surely we can use them to tell me whether Father is dead or alive. That would be some sort of closure; he could weep for them, and know they hadn’t come back to him because they couldn’t. It was a disconcerting feeling, to almost hope they were dead just so he would know at last, one way or the other. It was sobering and distressing at the same time, so he pushed it away from his thoughts through force of will, as he had become accustomed to doing by his training.

  The dyheli were as excited over their own finds as Darian was; with all four of them equally eager to return to k’Valdemar, the young stags alternated their easy, distance-eating lope with bursts of full-out gallop. Darian had only to hang on; they would get him home faster than any other means except by air - though now he was regretting that he had not brought Kel along. Kel couldn’t have carried him home, but he could have taken those precious bones to Firesong.

  He didn’t dare send Kuari ahead with the bones. For one thing, Kuari wasn’t that fast a flyer; for another, they needed his eyes when the sun set. Which was going to be very shortly. . . . The dyheli could see fairly well in the dark, but not at the breakneck pace they were setting now, and Darian was not willing to waste the power it would take to set mage-lights above and ahead of them; he preferred to use it to augment the dyheli’s strength. They needed Kuari’s night-sight, and the owl was happy to oblige.

  Darkness gradually crept over the forest, and the dyheli linked their minds to Kuari’s. The owl swooped down from among the branches and flew a little ahead of the racing riders, about an arm’s-length higher than their heads. From this position, he could see anything that would trip the dyheli in any way - and so could they, through his eyes. Wintersky’s bird had already come down and was riding his shoulder, gripping the padding and hunched down with his wings held close to his body.

  Darian guessed that it was just about midnight when the first light of k’Valdemar glimmered through the trees in the distance. The weary dyheli found an untapped reservoir of strength, and broke into a last, tired gallop.

  They stumbled through the Veil, and into the waiting hands of the hertasi. Wintersky had turned his own attention to notifying the hertasi - and thus the Vale - of what they had discovered as soon as they were within range. With Darian occupied in keeping up the stags’ energy, he had no attention to spare for that particular job.

  But thanks to Wintersky, not only were hertasi waiting, but so were Firesong, Silverfox, and Snowfire. The latter took charge of Wintersky, who was just as exhausted as Darian, and ushered him away for congratulations, food, and rest.

  Firesong took one look at Darian’s fever-filled eyes, and simply took charge of the bones and his pupil. “You won’t rest until we know something,” Firesong said wisely, and with unusual gentleness. “Come along; I think I can at least tell you whether your father is alive or dead.”

  He took Darian by the elbow, and guided him in the direction of his ekele and workroom. Darian didn’t resist; he felt as if he was consumed by the need to know. It was a fire in his blood, a blinding light in his mind.

  They went straight to the workroom, where Firesong already had shields cast and the room prepared for what they would do. When all three of them were inside, Firesong motioned for Darian to sit, and closed up the shields, sealing them inside.

  He collapsed onto a stool, and stared hungrily at Firesong, who took the bones and carefully unwrapped them. Darian couldn’t look away from the tiny white fragments; they drew his gaze and held it.

  Firesong placed them down on the floor and sat cross-legged on a cushion beside them. Then he contemplated them for a moment, while Darian’s heart pounded.

  “First thing, I think - ” the Adept broke off what he was saying, and closed his eyes, holding his hands palm down over the bones. “Link with me, Dar’ian,” he ordered, but in a half-absent voice. Darian didn’t question whether he had the strength available; he linked first with a ley-line, and then with his teacher, clutching the stool with both hands.

  There was a moment of double-disorientation, as the raw power from the line rushed into him, then as he melded with Firesong. When he got himself straightened out again, Firesong was setting up a complicated relational field enclosing the bones. :This was once part of a greater whole,: the Adept said to him, quite dispassionately - but it was vitally important to be dispassionate when handling magic. :You see what I am setting up here? I’m reestablishing a connection with the rest of the body this once belonged to - the plane of Power doesn’t care about distance in our world, that’s why we can Gate when things there are stable enough. By reconnecting in that plane what used to be connected there and here, I can learn something about the state of the rest of the body.:

  Darian watched with fascination that was not quite as dispassionate as Firesong’s. The Adept was literally weaving a web of power between the artifacts here, and - and something somewhere else; a web that was possible only because they had once been connected.

  When the last thread was in place, Firesong gathered up a little more power - surprisingly little - and gave it a command, in effect saying to it wordlessly, Show me what you would be like if you were still one object.

  The power settled over the bones in a tenuous, visible mist, while all three of them watched with varying degrees of hope and fear. If Darian’s father was dead, there would be no change - or the change would show conditions even less pleasant than a handful of dry bones.

  The mist took on a pinkish tinge, swirled a little -

  - then took on the ghostly outlines of a healthy, whole foot.

  Darian hadn’t realized that he’d made a sound until he heard it in his own ears - half a strangled sob, half a choked-off gasp. But he certainly felt the tears suddenly fill his eyes and blur the scene in front of him, then pour down his cheeks in an outpouring of the emotions he would not give in to while he was still linked in with the line. Silverfox rested a calming hand on his shoulder, a comfort and warmth that released some of the tension that had been building in him.

  “Right; well, that’s the main thing,” Firesong muttered, and played a bit more with the relational field. He got no changes, however, and finally dismissed it with a sigh of frustration. Darian blinked burning eyes and told himself fiercely not to be disappointed; this was more, much, much more, than he had known yesterday at this time.

  “I tried to get a sense of direction and distance, but I didn’t get much,” Firesong said, as Darian let go his own hold on the ley-line. This time Darian did not try to replenish anything; he needed the energy himself too much. “All I got was t
hat it is north and to the west, and so far away that I couldn’t get any reading on distance.”

  “But he is alive,” Darian said, his own voice sounding forlorn even in his own ears.

  “He is alive,” Firesong replied, and smiled, patting Darian’s knee, adding his comfort to his partner’s. “Very much alive, and I think it far more likely than not that your mother is alive and well and with him. If he survived - with the loss of a foot - then she likely did, still intact.”

  The sudden outburst of tears surprised him, though it didn’t appear to surprise either Firesong or Silverfox. It was over in just a few moments, but he felt as drained as if he’d just done his entire Mastery Trial all over again.

  Silverfox helped him to his feet, as Firesong handed him a square of gauze cloth to wipe his eyes and nose with. “You’ve been through more than enough for one day,” the kestra’chern said. “And since Keisha is off with the Heralds, why don’t you stay with us overnight? I think you need company.”

  “I - think I do, too,” Darian confessed, and followed both of them up the staircase to the ekele-above, his legs leaden weights, his head full of confused bits of thought that refused to come together into anything coherent.

  They sat him down on a low sling-couch; Silverfox went out briefly and came back with food and something hot to drink. Numbly, Darian ate and drank without tasting anything, and listened while the two of them talked lightly of utter commonplaces. The longer he sat, the heavier his head seemed, until at length it felt as if it was easier to lie down than remain seated upright. Silverfox stepped over to him, uncapped a small brown bottle from a nearby shelf, and gently touched two fingertips to Darian’s forehead just between his eyebrows. Darian focused on the unusual touch, and Silverfox waved the open bottle under Darian’s nose while he was distracted.

  Then, in spite of his certainty that he wouldn’t be able to sleep the entire night - he closed his eyes for a moment, and knew nothing more until morning.