Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  At last Callion was helping her to her feet and guiding her down the hall, and she could think, "Bath, bath," and "Bed, bed," and not much else at all. "Wine?" she asked Callion, and he laughed and said something that sounded very soft and blurry to her, and she was going to insist that he get her some more wine immediately when Callion guided her into a room and stood her in front of a mattress, and it rose up and hit her in the face.

  I'm drunk, she thought, but that was silly. She'd only had three small glasses of wine. Nobody got drunk on just three little glasses of…

  Fifty-four

  "All three of them are soundly asleep." Hultif met his uncle outside of the third guest room. "How do you know none of them got too much of the drug, though?"

  Callion glanced over at his nephew. "I don't know, and except for the one Matthiall called Jayjay, I don't care. The other two are essentially expendable. If Jayjay got too much, I can give her an antidote."

  Hultif frowned and tried to see what his uncle was thinking from the expression on his face. He got nothing. "But according to the omens, all three of them are necessary if we wish to assure Aidris Akalan's overthrow."

  "Oh, they are. And we'll use them. I've checked this from every possible angle," Callion assured him. Hultif noticed that his uncle was mixing herbs into a bag—preparing for some complex spell, no doubt. "I can't kill Matthiall outright; in some way I haven't yet deciphered, he's bound to Jayjay, and I can't be sure that she'll survive if he dies, at least not yet. Once I've bound her to me, his survival will cease to matter. But according to my predictions, if I throw him to the Machnan, my chances of successfully overthrowing the Akalan snake improve dramatically." He chuckled.

  "Likewise, if I dump the other girl into Aidris Akalan's lap, she will apparently create enough of a diversion that I can take my Watchmistress candidate right into Cotha Maest under her nose and declare myself Watchmaster."

  Hultif frowned. He offered a polite objection, carefully phrased; lesser relatives, after all, did not directly confront relatives as senior and powerful as Callion. "I don't remember the omens pointing in that direction, Uncle."

  "How could you? They only began to point in that direction once these three landed on my doorstep."

  "Of course." Hultif bowed slightly. "Will you be needing me immediately?"

  "Not for a while." Callion was absorbed in his herb work. He didn't bother looking at Hultif, which was good for Hultif; he felt agitated and disturbed by his uncle's new plan, and feared his distress might show on his face.

  "Then may I beg your indulgence for a short time. I have several things I must do to get ready for the things that are coming."

  His uncle waved him off. "Go. Go. I'll call you when I need you."

  Hultif hurried away. He wanted to consult the omens; he didn't wish to call his uncle a liar, but he had been under the impression that all three of these creatures who had landed on his uncle's doorstep had been essential, and he hadn't thought they'd been meant to serve as sacrifices.

  Fifty-five

  Aidris Akalan found the hidden door at last. By careful divination, she could trace its true form hidden within the flawless disguise the ancient master had cast over it. What she had found was one of the gate trees of the Aregen…the Aregen she had been certain she had destroyed, save for her servant Hultif. Apparently she had been deceived by more than Hultif's show of obedience, for this tree lived, and since it had admitted her enemies and shielded them from her, so did the Aregen monster who'd planted it.

  She frowned. Matthiall and the two Machnan wizards were hiding in the Aregen's domain. She wanted to get them out, but she had marched her army under cover of false night and that had cost her dearly; when she reached the place where the trio had camped the night before, she'd stepped through the shields and triggered a trap set by one of them. That trap had been designed to drain her of magical energy, and though she'd gotten free of it, it too had cost. She did not have the energy left to root out this ancient enemy and destroy Matthiall and the Machnan wizards too.

  Her band of hunters clustered around her; she'd pulled in the boundaries of her false night once she and her men caught up with the fugitives. She needed to save everything she had left.

  Or perhaps she could make use of the Watchers, she thought.

  They might be able to smash their way through the gate tree for her. Even if they couldn't, they could kill a few of the men she'd brought along with her and replenish her magical stores. At full strength, Aidris knew she was equal to the task of driving the Aregen out of his home and killing him; she would do that and kill the wizards and torture Matthiall. And then she would live forever.

  Except her Watchers had abandoned her. They hadn't gone after Matthiall and the Machnan wizards. Instead, they had run. Had hidden. Why else had she reached the traitor and the two bitches before them?

  But if she did not have the Watchers, she had nothing. No power. No immortality. She had to try to summon them.

  She looked at her soldiers setting up their camps. Kin or Kin-hera, every one of them. Meat to the Watchers. And her.

  She lifted her head and closed her eyes and sent her silent call racing through the forest, spreading out like ripples fleeing from a rock thrown into a pond. She rode the ripples, waiting for an answer. She tried to keep any feeling of need out of her summons. She wanted them to believe she called them from a position of power, as she had when she opened the Rift and drew them out of it a thousand years ago. She didn't want them to suspect she was weakened by her travails. She called, and got no response but silence.

  She called again.

  She waited, while the ripples spread out to fill Glenraven and began to bound back and overlap. The Watchers didn't answer. Aidris opened her eyes and frowned. She sent her message again.

  The Watchers still didn't answer.

  Fifty-six

  Callion drew the circle around Matthiall's body and scattered some of the herbs across the unconscious Kin's chest. He murmured the words of an ancient holding spell; when he said the last of them, Matthiall's skin glowed softly. Then his breathing became imperceptible and his skin became pale, almost translucent, and parchment white.

  "I don't dare kill you," Callion whispered, "but I can do something as good."

  His spell would hold for a few hours, perhaps as much as a day. Once it wore off, Matthiall could become a problem. If Callion could not find a way to break the bond between him and Jayjay, without killing Jayjay, that problem wouldn't go away. Callion needed to find a place to put Matthiall.

  He paced and thought. He wanted a place that would neutralize Matthiall's magic, some place that would hold him in…but a place that would protect him from outside enemies, too, because Callion knew he needed Jayjay, and if someone killed Matthiall and Jayjay died as a result, that would be the end of Callion's plans for a new Aregen empire.

  A wizard's bell would be the perfect place, if he could find one that was sealed…

  Callion began to laugh. From his lair, he spied on everyone in Glenraven. He recalled the uproar in Zearn that had resulted in the Sarijann wizard being walled into his tower. If Callion were to transport Matthiall into that bell—a difficult trick, but not an impossible one, since the bell hadn't been built with Aregen magic in mind—he could dispose of his own problem and create an interesting new one for the Machnan.

  He settled onto his haunches and scratched a little divining triangle in the dirt. He held a hand over it and concentrated on pinpointing an empty space inside the Aptogurria in Zearn. The triangular line he'd drawn spun slowly until the leading point aimed itself at Callion's target; when it was done, the dirt inside of the scratched shape took on a leathery appearance and lifted up until it floated at eye level before Callion. The Aregen chuckled and drew a line through the air from the triangular badge to Matthiall's chest. The arrow crept along the invisible line he'd traced until it had settled itself on Matthiall.

  "Go," Callion whispered.

  Matthial
l vanished.

  Fifty-seven

  Jayjay thrashed at the edge of a nightmare. In this dream someone held her head underwater; ripped her heart, still beating, from her chest; stole from her the one thing that could make her life complete.

  The dream began only with feelings of dread and loss, but then it gathered form and substance. She found herself walking through a crowd. Walking…walking…through silence so thick and heavy and cruel it felt solid. It impeded her steps and weighed her down…walking past people who stared at her. They stood on both sides of a narrow path, and their cold, judgmental eyes followed her. Silent stares, cruel eyes. Walking, every step harder than the last.

  She was walking down the aisle of a church. Getting married. Again.

  "No one congratulates a woman who's getting married for the fourth time," a voice said. She recognized it as her own, but didn't know where it came from. "No one is happy for her. Even her friends will say, 'Well, I hope this one works out,' or 'I guess you know what you're doing.' They won't ever say 'That's wonderful,' or 'I'm so happy for you.' They aren't. And everyone else will roll their eyes or laugh or say something cutting. That's just the way it is."

  A deep, rich, masculine voice said, "What difference does it make what other people say?"

  She knew the voice, but lost as she was in the dream, she couldn't place a name to it. "It matters."

  "Why?"

  That was stupid. Because she had to live with the people who would turn their backs on her and laugh at her and remark on her stupidity or her poor choice of men or her trashiness. Anyone married more than once was tarred by a slight brush of trashiness, and more than twice…well, more than two marriages was the kiss of death.

  "Don't you deserve love?"

  "I've screwed up too many times."

  "That isn't what I asked. Don't you deserve to be loved?"

  "Everybody deserves to be loved."

  "And I love you. I will love you and cherish you and spend the rest of my life with you. I can't promise I won't hurt you, but I won't intentionally hurt you. I won't leave you. I won't cheat on you. I will love you the way you deserve to be loved."

  In her dream, Jay was nearing the pulpit. The crowd cleared, and she could see the man standing at the front of the church waiting for her. It was Matthiall.

  She realized she had known that, but she didn't want to admit it to herself. She wanted to keep listening to his wonderful words. Jay looked at Matthiall and found that she desired him. She loved him. But Sophie would be horrified if Jay took up with a nonhuman. Her other friends would, too.

  He'd saved her life. He loved her. She didn't know him very well, but she had known all three of her husbands before she married them—had known them for years. And those marriages had been nightmares.

  Nightmares.

  Nightmares.

  She was in a nightmare. The church was full of her ex-husbands and her friends and the people she'd grown up with, with what was left of her family, with strangers who'd heard she was getting married again, and who wanted to come watch. People in the back of the church were sitting around on blankets, eating picnic lunches and pointing at her. Someone was selling hot dogs; she couldn't see the man but she could hear him shouting "Hot dogs! Hot dogs! Get'cher r-r-r-r-reeeddd-hot hot dogs!"

  "I love you," she whispered to Matthiall.

  She looked down at herself and realized she was standing there naked, and everyone she had ever known was pointing at her and laughing.

  "I love you…but we could never work. I can't ever have anyone again; it simply doesn't work out for me."

  And she turned and ran up the aisle, back the way she'd come, trying to get away from the probing eyes and mocking looks of the people who knew her and didn't think she measured up.

  Fifty-eight

  Yemus watched the simulacrums moving across his tabletop representation of Glenraven's Cavitarin Wood. His doppelganger made steady progress toward Aidris Akalan's troops, and the soldiers who followed it had not yet noticed that they pursued a wraith. Meanwhile, Jayjay and Sophie had disappeared from sight. This worried him, but he had faith that whatever they were doing would work toward the good of Glenraven. He'd given up on them once before, and look where that had gotten him. And for no reason. He wouldn't lose faith in them again.

  A sudden chill in the room and a change in the air pressure caused him to look up; when he did, he saw the air near the walled-up door to the tower thickening and growing dark. It looked for a moment as if the air had sprouted a tunnel entrance. In another instant, Yemus realized that was exactly what he was looking at, for something fell out of the tunnel and landed on his floor with a thud; then the tunnel disappeared with a loud pop. He found himself looking at the unmoving body of a man. Yemus rose and walked over to him, wondering what magic could breach the Aptogurria's spell-shielded walls, and why anyone would employ that power to dump another man into his prison with him…and then he realized the man in the room with him wasn't a man at all. He was Alfkindir.

  "Why—?"

  He knelt and felt for a pulse; the Kin had one, but it was thready and fast. Yemus frowned and rolled the Kin over onto his back. The stranger had a feel of power surrounding him; Yemus guessed he was one of the Kin wizards, but that made the situation even stranger. Who would be strong enough to dispose of a Kin wizard…and to do it by breaking him into an unbreachable magical stronghold like the Aptogurria?

  Aidris Akalan is involved, Yemus decided.

  If Aidris was involved, that would make this man her enemy. If he was the Watchmistress's enemy, then Yemus could probably consider him a friend. If not a friend, at least a temporary ally.

  Yemus went to his workbench and brought back an unraveler, a convenient little device his grandfather had developed when he was Zearn's chief wizard. Yemus lay the unraveler on the unconscious Kin's chest and activated it by feeding it a tiny amount of magical energy. The unraveler went to work, disassembling each spell on the man in reverse order.

  First the unraveler tried to send him back where he'd come from, but it didn't have the power to do that. It followed the sequence required to do it, however, and Yemus got his first feel of his enemy's style. Then it began to disassemble a stasis spell. Again, that was done differently than Yemus would have done it. It was a spell that relied on brute force, not finesse—a spell done by someone with enormous power, someone who didn't have to conserve every trace of magical energy.

  The spell fell away and the man began to wake up. Yemus discovered that in the meantime the unraveler had begun to disassemble another spell, and he quickly removed it and repaired the step it had begun to take apart; that spell appeared to be one the man had cast upon himself, and Yemus didn't think he'd appreciate having it disrupted.

  The Kin opened his eyes and squinted up at the ceiling. He frowned, raised a hand to his forehead, and while he rubbed his temples, he moaned.

  "How are you?" Yemus asked.

  The Kin took notice of him for the first time. "Who are you…and what are you doing here?"

  Yemus laughed. "I should be asking you the same thing. But from the looks of things, you've been through something bad; so…I'm Yemus Sarijann, First Wizard of Zearn. Only wizard now, of course…but…" He shrugged. "And I'm imprisoned in here, as you are."

  "I know who you are, then." The Kin pushed himself toward a sitting position, but lost his balance and fell back. Yemus caught him before he could hit his head on the stone floor and helped him to sit.

  "Thank you." The Kin looked around the room, then at Yemus. "I've heard of you," he said. "I'm Matthiall, son of Gerlin and Elloe, last of the Shae Kin." He nodded politely.

  Yemus smiled. "Welcome to my humble abode."

  "We are imprisoned?"

  "Indeed. You find yourself in Zearn's Aptogurria, once my workplace and now my jail…and yours. Do you have any idea how you got here?"

  Matthiall stood and walked slowly to the narrow slit window. He looked out; he didn't have to raise up
on his toes to see the way Yemus did. With his back to Yemus, he said, "None…except that I went to an old friend for help, and when I woke up I was here instead of there."

  Yemus thought of the odd magic, done in a style he had never seen. "What sort of old friend was this?"

  "One of the last of the Aregen."

  "The Masters? My God, I thought the Masters were extinct."

  "Not entirely."

  "I see." He pondered the wisdom of telling the Kin what he knew, then decided it couldn't hurt. "Your friend isn't much of a friend, I'd say. There was a spell on you, meant to keep you unconscious for a day or better. Powerful thing. And the magic that dumped you on my floor was no mean feat, either. The magic of both was new to me. It was power magic, spells that didn't need to lever a little magic to create a bigger effect."

  "Callion sent me here, then." Matthiall turned and stared at Yemus. "I have to get out of here. He still has Jay and Sophie."

  Ice froze in Yemus's blood. "Two outsiders? Women?"

  Matthiall nodded. "You know them. From what I've been able to piece together, you were in some way responsible for bringing them here."

  "And now they're in the hands of a Master?" Yemus shuddered. "Do you have any idea what he'll do?"

  "I thought he would help me," Matthiall said. "Since I was so wrong about that, I don't expect anything else I can offer about the misborn little monster will have much value."

  Yemus stood. "There's that." He walked to the table on which his simulacrums still went about their business. He looked down, and discovered that Sophie's simulacrum had reappeared. He pointed. "Sophie is right there. See her?" She stood still for just an instant; then she began running. Warrags chased her through the forest, and Kin raced to cut her off. They captured her. They dragged her to Aidris.