Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

How had she come to be in the tent with him? Why was she there? And where was Sophie, and what part had she had in Jay's night spent sleeping with Matthiall?

  Confused memories flashed through Jay's mind, memories of a beautiful promise but underlying that promise nightmares and terrible pain; vaguely, she recalled attacking animals and floating in a cold and dark place far above her body, very near death; she recalled scenes of her husbands and their various brutalities and betrayals. And Matthiall walking through the minefields of her dreams, touching them and taking away some of the ugliness.

  I love him, the voice in her heart insisted, and she silenced that thought before it could cause her more trouble than she already had.

  She sat up and stretched; the morning chill invaded the tent and wrapped itself around her like the wet, clinging tentacles of an octopus. She shivered and rubbed vigorously at the goose bumps, and when she did, she noted the pale silver lines of old, healed scars around both of her wrists and a long, ugly cross that ran from the inside of her right wrist, around and up her forearm. She frowned. She'd never had scars there before. A few cigarette burns on her back from her second marital mistake. One scar on her ankle from a run-in with a stray shard of glass when she was nine. Nothing on her wrists. Where had those silvered lines come from?

  And what made her so certain she'd danced with death the previous night?

  She looked back to Matthiall. To the fierce angles and proud lines of his face, repose added a gentleness that caught her breath in her throat and made her want to touch him.

  She reached out a hand to stroke his lips and stopped herself. She pulled back, stared, and after a moment reached over and shook his shoulder. "Wake up."

  His eyes opened, and he looked up at her and smiled—a smile of breathtaking beauty, of unbounded joy—

  "Oh my soul," he whispered.

  No one had ever looked at her that way. No one. She had always dreamed someone would, but in the face of reality, she pulled back. He was not human. Not human. She stared at him, feeling her mouth go dry, feeling her pulse begin to pound in her temples; she licked her lips and shook her head in slow, uncertain denial. "No. Not me. I don't know what happened, but I can't be your soul." She swallowed hard. Her eyes filled, but she blinked away the tears and said, "I can't be anyone's soul."

  He sat watching her, silent. She felt his pain at her rejection, and she tried to cover it with talk. "I dreamed of terrible things last night…and I don't remember how I got here…I'm sure there's a logical explanation, but you have to know I'm not the kind of woman who climbs into a tent with a stranger…" She felt like an idiot; her mouth was spouting words her heart didn't believe. She belonged with him—belonged, dammit—and she was sitting there lying and pretending she didn't; she was pretending she didn't know something magical had happened between the two of them, and even though she knew she was acting like an idiot, she couldn't make herself stop. Fear. This was what fear did. "I mean, you're a complete stranger—"

  "We've never been strangers, but I won't insist on that point. Last night you were dying. I knew a way to save your life, so I did."

  She nodded and swallowed hard again. "And I want to thank you…and before I go back to the United States, I'm sure I'll find a way…my God, I'll make sure I repay you…but…well…this isn't where I need to be. I'm sure you understand that. It looks so…well…none of my friends would understand—"

  Matthiall watched her with his sad, knowing eyes, and when she finally ran out of stupid things to say, he nodded slowly, and smiled the smile of a man who was gallantly conceding defeat. "I understand, Jay." He spread his hands in front of him and flexed the fingers so the tips of the black needle claws peeked out from the fleshy folds. "I do understand." He sighed, and Jay thought she saw brightness in his eyes, but he blinked rapidly and when he looked up at her, she decided she had imagined all of it. "Whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. If you want my help in getting you home, then that's what you will have." He tried to smile again, but it didn't come off well at all.

  "I appreciate that," she told him, starting to back toward the tent flap. "I do. God, you've been great, saving us from the Watchers and getting us out of Cotha Maest and then saving my life, too. I wish I'd met you before I screwed up my life…" And then she started to cry, and she backed out of the tent before he could see.

  Forty-eight

  Sophie, huddled under her inadequate rain poncho, heard the tent unzip. She turned to see Jay crawl out and blink as rain hit her face. Jay looked drawn and pale but she was inarguably alive. Sophie stretched and tucked her sword into its sheath, then hurried to her friend's side.

  "You're alive!" Sophie hugged her.

  Jay nodded, biting her lip and not saying anything. Sophie wondered if she'd been crying but in the dismal gray pissing rain, she couldn't tell. Then Jay took a second, hard look at her, and whatever she'd been feeling before vanished beneath an expression of pure shock. "My God, Soph…what happened to you?"

  Sophie had let the rain wash away the warrag's blood. It hadn't done a particularly good job, but her skin was now neither sticky nor cracked, and the smell of dried blood and excrement and urine had lessened; she could still see blood on her hands, however, so she probably had even more on her face. Worse, her wet clothing clung to her body with uncomfortable intimacy, heavy and cold. She would have loved to wear warm, dry clothes, but she hadn't taken the time to change, fearing that any lapse of her attention would create the window of opportunity the Alfkindir hunters needed. She pointed at the warrag. "We had company…but I'm okay. How do you feel?"

  Jay kept staring at the warrag, her expression impressed. "Tired," she said. "Kind of confused. I don't remember anything after we started running in that cave."

  "You don't want to remember. It was bad. I was sure I'd never see you again." Sophie shook her head and looked at the dead warrag. She sighed. "I was sure none of us would survive the night."

  Jay walked toward the warrag, shaking her head. "I'm surprised you could kill that thing. Three of us couldn't destroy the first one."

  "We didn't think Grah was going to hurt us. I knew this hunter wanted us dead. And besides, this time I had a sword. We're lucky he was the only one who attacked. His friends were waiting outside the wards to find out what happened to him. When he didn't come back, they decided to go get stronger help."

  Jay's eyes communicated her blank bewilderment. "Wards? What are wards?"

  Sophie nodded. "Something Matthiall put up around our camp. You can't see them, but you can sure feel them." She shrugged. "It was magic." Then she glanced down at Jayjay's arms and gasped. Jayjay wore the evidence of even more of Matthiall's magic. The voragel bites were nothing but thin, healed scars. Sophie touched Jay's right wrist. "My God, how did he do that?"

  Matthiall came out of the tent at that moment, and both Jay and Sophie turned to face him. His eyes bore silent testimony to suffering and exhaustion. They were hollow and sunken and the skin beneath them was so dark it looked bruised. "I took her pain. I took her wounds." His voice sounded ragged, as if he had only that moment crossed the finish line of a marathon. "I gave her my strength. The poison that was deadly for her only weakened me. Now we'll both live."

  "How did you do that?" Sophie asked.

  The Kin glanced at Jayjay and Sophie saw longing in his eyes—longing and pain and suppressed desire kept in check, or perhaps denied. "I…discovered that she and I have…similarities; they allowed me to make a…sort of sacrifice." He pointed at the dead warrag. "They found us last night?"

  "Yes. A large party of them. They ran across the wards, and stopped outside of them. Several of them kept mentioning Watchers," Sophie told him. "Only this one came through, and I killed him as quickly as I could." She felt sick reliving the struggle through her words. She cut her explanation short. "They said they would come back tonight with a…" She considered the conversation she'd heard the night before. "... a kindari. Kindeli. Something like that."

  "Kintari?" M
atthiall suggested.

  "That was the word."

  "Then we have to leave right now. If the Kintari they recruit is old or powerful, they won't have to wait until tonight. A Kintari will travel in daylight without difficulty, and in this rain, some of the stronger Kin-hera will be able to travel, too. Even if they can't, they'll be able to give him adequate directions for finding this place." Matthiall sighed. "And perhaps Aidris Akalan will hear what the Kin-hera have to say and find the trip worth making in person. If that happens, and if she reaches us before we reach my friend's domain, we'll die."

  As they began packing up the camp, fighting the cold dreary, ugly storm, hastily shoving things into backpacks and trying to erase signs of their passage, Sophie thought of Jay's Fodor's Guide to Glenraven. Sophie thought she probably ought to mention the book's unnerving behavior of the night before—both the message it had given and the brilliant light it had set off—but she was afraid if she did, she would be creating a delay that could mean their deaths. If the three of them survived to reach Matthiall's friend's house—or domain, as he had called it—she could bring up the subject of the magical travel guide and its smug predictions of heroism.

  When everything was packed, Matthiall went to stand beside the corpse of the dead warrag. He raised his hands above it and chanted softly, and as he did, light curled from his splayed fingertips and glowed across the warrag's fur, flickering like fire in the rainy morning.

  "Dust you were, dust you shall become," he said, finishing his impromptu funeral service.

  The light grew brighter, and to Sophie's astonishment, it began to devour the warrag. It did so without mess, without smoke, without spilling blood or gore, and, she realized after a moment, without leaving even the slightest trace to indicate that there had indeed been a dead warrag lying on that spot.

  Matthiall glanced up to find her watching him. Jayjay had turned to watch, too.

  "I don't want them to be sure of how he died. The Watchers frequently disintegrate their victims when they've finished taking everything they want. Further, I'll leave a little surprise beneath the wards. Whoever finds this hiding place will wish he hadn't."

  Sophie wondered what kind of surprise he intended to leave. Something explosive, perhaps. Maybe something worse. She'd seen enough of the real Glenraven to believe deadly magical surprises were not only possible, but probable. In these circumstances, she hoped she was right.

  Forty-nine

  Aidris listened with growing frustration to the tale of ineptitude spun for her by her servants. "You found them, but only Hmarrg attacked? Only Hmarrg?" She stared from warrag to tiny flying tesbit to enormous cold-eyed dagreth, and considered that these three idiots were only representatives of the large group that had located Matthiall and the wizards.

  "We still don't know that we found them. We still believe we may have come across a place marked by your Watchers, Mistress." The dagreth shifted and wouldn't meet her eyes. "If they were your Watchers, we didn't want to disturb them."

  "And the magic of the place was so strong, even if it came from your targets, we felt sure only a Kintari could overcome it," the tesbit shrilled. It fluttered over the dagreth's head, red eyes glowing like beacons in the darkened room.

  "So you let Hmarrg go into this warded barrier by himself to test your theory that something dangerous hid inside, and when he failed to come out, you decided you had better come back for help."

  They nodded.

  "Even though," she continued, "if you had all rushed in together, you could probably have overcome whatever you found inside, and certainly you could have overcome one Kin and two Machnan women."

  The warrag cleared his throat. "That isn't the way you described our prey to us, Mistress," he said, managing to appear diffident even as he corrected her. "You described the two Machnan women as the mightiest and most deadly of wizards. We didn't need a description of Matthiall. We know how dangerous he is. If all of us rushed in together, perhaps all of us would have perished, and then no one could have come to tell you that we found them."

  "At least so you convinced yourselves." Aidris wanted to kill the three of them right there, the lying cowards; then she wished she could round up the others who had accompanied this hunting party and destroy them, too.

  She wouldn't do that, however. She would have them take her to the place where they had found their invisible, warded barrier. She would take the Watchers with her. And once she had fed the wizards to her Watchers, she would allow them to devour the pitiful hunters, too.

  "Take me to where you left them," she said.

  "Daylight—" the warrag protested, but Aidris silenced him with a wave of her hand. "I will summon darkness through which you can travel safely. The day already leans toward the dark. Bringing on the blackness of night will not strain me overmuch."

  She watched the three hunters glance nervously at each other. Inside she smiled, though her smile never touched her lips. They were wise to fear her. They had simply not feared her enough when it could have saved them.

  She debated calling the Watchers to her right then, but thought better of it. They grew restless and hungry and unpredictable if forced to stay among what they saw as food for any length of time without reward. They might tire of traveling and devour Aidris's hunting party before she was ready to have them devoured. And besides, they were hidden from her; they were still someplace beyond the reach of every magic she could muster. She didn't give that fact much thought. If she did, she might begin to suspect betrayal, and if she were to live forever, her Watchers could never betray her.

  She decided instead to wait until she reached Matthiall's hiding place, then call them and let them have their fun.

  She said, "Wait here," and went from the windowless meeting room up the twisting stairs to her wizard's bell. She stared out at a pounding, miserable rain that bent the tops of the trees around the cotha and drummed on the metal-clad bell roof and hissed down the glass. Disgusting, cold rain. She felt a creeping, damp draft curl around her ankles and without thinking about it, traced the draft back to its source and blocked it with a tiny touch of magic.

  Then she lifted a hand and reached toward the sky, and drew the clouds together tighter, feeling power flowing through her like a river. Between the particles of water, she spun webs of blackness. This was an unnatural darkness and costly for her to maintain, but even if the rain ceased it would hold out the searching brilliance of the sun. Then she linked the darkness to herself; now the sprawling blackness would follow her, and those who traveled with her would not die from the steady beating of sunlight on their skins.

  She smiled, considering how they would die.

  Then she thought further. She would do best to travel with her army. She didn't think Matthiall and his two Machnan magicians would be a match for her and her Watchers, but overconfidence had destroyed mighty empires. She wouldn't let it, or anything else, destroy her.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and harnessed the river of magic once more. She used it to send out an order her troops received immediately—a compulsion to meet her at the gate of Cotha Maest. While she was preparing a few necessities, they would gather below. With her troops and her Watchers and her power, Matthiall, his wizards, and the threat they posed to her eternal rule would die.

  Fifty

  They wouldn't listen and they wouldn't come. Yemus punched his fist into the simulacrum board, scattering the moving images of disaster into rainbow shards of light that smeared across the walls and disappeared. Not even his own brother Torrin would listen; Yemus had formed an image of himself and had humbled himself in front of his brother and begged him to listen. Torrin had told him to writhe in shame for eternity.

  They all thought the solitary confinement had cracked him, made him desperate. They didn't understand and they wouldn't try.

  Yemus stared out the slit window at his home. His people. Glenraven. He could save them; he could redeem them. Except no one would listen.

  Fifty
men would turn the tide. A mere fifty. Just enough to do…something. Yemus couldn't quite see what they were going to do against Aidris Akalan, but fifty of them could do it successfully. And he couldn't get one.

  He grabbed at a tapestry on the wall and tried to rip it with his bare hands. It resisted, and he had the feeling it would resist longer than he could try; he wasn't a strong man, nor a fast one. He couldn't fight, he couldn't cast destructive spells. He could finagle a bit of information from the recalcitrant future if it felt like cooperating. He could create some damned fine artifacts, but never deadly ones. He could do a few entertaining little tricks to amuse Torrin's guests at festivals. He was clever.

  But cleverness wouldn't stop Aidris Akalan. And he couldn't summon out of thin air the fifty fighters that would.

  Something snagged at his thoughts. A pattern of things that he could do. Artifacts. Festival tricks. Cleverness.

  No, he thought. I need fifty men. I need someone to listen to me. But the idea persisted.

  Cleverness.

  Festival tricks.

  Yes.

  It won't work, he thought. And then he thought it might.

  Festival tricks and cleverness. An artifact.

  A little light, a little magic, a tiny little deception. He began to smile. Maybe he could summon those fifty men after all. Maybe Glenraven wasn't lost. Hope was a funny thing. Suddenly he had energy; he was in a hurry; he had a thousand things to do and a thousand details to consider and minutes in which to set his deception going.

  Fifty-one

  Andu, charged for the next two bells with keeping everyone away from the wizard's tower, jumped at the sound of the explosion. He stared from the smoke that poured out of the shadowed wall to the dark figure who retreated from the Aptogurria, and felt his commission slipping away as he did.

  "Halt!" he bellowed, but he didn't expect the bastard Yemus to listen…and Yemus didn't disappoint him. "Halt! Traitor!"