Elvenblood (25 page)

"You won't like it," Shana warned.

Kelyan grimaced. "Probably not, but then, you never know. It's been a long time since I left. You might tell me that—overbearing brute Lord Dyran got skewered by an alicorn or something, and
that
would make me very happy. He's half the reason I ended up out here."

At the mention of Dyran's name, both Shana and Mero started, and Kelyan flashed an unexpected smile. "You know him! So something
did
happen to the boor? How pleasant! I hope it was nasty."

"It—was," Shana managed. "It's very complicated, though. It will take a while in the telling."

"Let me just savor the moment then, and give you some useful information while I do so." Kelyan smiled again, the satisfied smile of a child surprised with a sweetmeat. "You know, for my supposedly deadliest enemies, I'm beginning to like you four quite a bit! Now—to begin with, these people are the ones the oldest chronicles refer to as the 'grel-riders,' although
they
haven't seen a grel for a century or more."

"Ah." Kalamadea nodded, satisfied. "I thought they might be. They certainly match what was written."

"First, a piece of
really important
information. They have something, and I do not know what it is, that makes them immune to magic, so don't bother trying anything on them." At Shana's grimace, he nodded. "I see you already discovered that."

"The hard way," she agreed, rubbing her arms. "At least they didn't attack back, so I suppose we're lucky."

He laughed. "Oh, they're utterly contemptuous of our magic. They have legends of it, but meeting with us has convinced them that the legends of truly powerful mages are exaggerations. Illusions do not deceive them unless it is an illusion of something that they
expect
to see and don't pay too much attention to—ah—" He thought for a moment "For instance, if one of them looked into this tent, I could spin an illusion of Jamal sitting here until I was blue, and they would still see me—but if I happened to manage to get into Jamal's tent and sit on his couch of state, they would believe it
was
Jamal there unless they looked at me very hard."

"Which means there's no point in trying to make them think we're oxen or invisible, and trying to escape that way," Keman finished for him.

He nodded. "Magical weapons—levin-bolts and the like—also do not work on them. Right now they are all very much on edge and nervous, because this is all foreign territory to them. They normally live hundreds of leagues south of here, but there has been a five-year drought in the South, and there's nothing for the cattle to graze on down there. They live by their herds; nearly everything they have or use comes from the cattle. They don't understand what's causing the drought, and that makes them nervous as well. They're afraid that their ancestor-spirits are angry with them, and nothing I can say seems to make any sense to them."

"May I assume you
do
know the cause of the drought?" Kalamadea hazarded gently.

"I can guess," Kelyan told him, with some evidence of interest. "That fool Dyran started meddling with the weather long before I was born, and convinced everyone else to give it a try—now there's no such thing as normal weather anymore. That was what ruined my family; what
used
to be a very nice little manor ended up flooded so often, it turned into a swamp, and now it's nothing but swamp and rain forest"

"And that was probably no accident, if someone in your family managed to get on Dyran's wrong side," Mero put in with a glower.

The flash of anger in Kelyan's eyes would have been answer enough, but he nodded to confirm Mero's guess. "Well, if too much rain has ended up there, it stands to reason the water had to come from somewhere else."

Kalamadea nodded, but said nothing.

"This arrangement of four tents in the center of the camp is very important," Kelyan went on. 'The easternmost is Jamal's—he's the War Chief. The westernmost belongs to the Iron Priest.
Do not
, no matter what, go into the northern and southern tents, unless and until a priest takes you there. Those are sacred to the spirits, and they will beat you to within an inch of your life if you desecrate the tents.
Then
they'll make you go through a ritual of purification that will make you wish they
had
beaten you to death."

He looked so grim when he said that; Shana had to wonder if he'd learned that the hard way, too.

A woman appeared at the entrance to the tent with a flat basket of finely woven grass; Kelyan rose immediately and took it from her, bringing it back to the center of the group. "Are you eating?" he called over his shoulder to Haldor, as he sat down.

Haldor shook his head.

Kelyan shrugged. "Your loss." He waved a hand at the basket; it contained a pile of flat white rounds, strips of what appeared to be grilled meat, onions, a set of round cups and a skin, and a bowl with something white in it. "The flat things are bread, more or less; the strips are beef and they are tasty enough, but tough. There's butter in the bowl, and the skin is full of fresh milk. You'll get flatbread and cheese in the morning, and more milk." He reached for a round of bread, deftly wrapped it around a strip of meat and onion, and poured himself a cup of milk. "Down south they had beer made from barley, but the barley ran out a while ago; I don't know what they'll do up here. Before the drought, the food was better than this; there were farmers to trade with, more variety." He raised an eyebrow at Shana, who was juggling a hot strip of meat from hand to hand. "I don't suppose that drivel about wanting to trade happened to be true by any stretch of the imagination?"

"Well," she said, getting the meat into the bread, and blowing on her fingers to cool them, "as it happens, it was. We—the wizards, I mean—had another confrontation with the elven lords; this time the ending was a bit more on our side, and the truce-treaty specified we could come down here and settle unmolested. We have things we can trade, and it's easier to trade for things than use up magic creating them."

Not that too many of us
can
create things, but let him think we can, like the greater elven lords
.

"Hmm." He said nothing more, but ate, quickly and neatly, and washed his meal down with the milk. Shana did the same, finding that the fare was not at all bad—although she could see that it would be very easy to tire of it quickly.

Kalamadea and Mero took more time with their meal, as she and Keman sketched in as much as they knew of the time that Kelyan and Haldor had missed. "I always figured that they couldn't possibly be getting rid of all of you halfbreeds," he commented, when they got to the second Wizard War. "There are just too many accidents, too many times that a concubine or a human field-slave happens to be fertile when her lord takes a fancy to her. And I figured that the results were being left out on the edge of the forest or something of the like. There's always been rumors of halfbreeds in the forest, living wild as wolves. I can't say it surprises me."

Since he was being so frank, Shana decided to return the favor. "Your entire attitude towards us surprises
me"
she told him. "I can't understand why you aren't—well—like Lord Dyran—"

"Because I'm
not
like Lord-Damned-Dyran," he replied fiercely. "Very few of those of us on the bare edges of society are at all like the High Lords! Have you any notion of what it's like to be elven and yet have next to no magic?"

She shook her head, dumbly.

"I have," Mero put in quietly. Both Shana and Kelyan turned to look at him. "After all, I spent most of my life in Dyran's manor. Shana, the elves base everything on how much magic a person commands. If you have a lot, you have everything. If you don't—well, I've seen slaves treated better than some of Dyran's pensioners."

Kelyan nodded, bitterly, and even Haldor seemed to be listening and not ignoring them.

"At least the slaves have set duties," Mero continued. "They aren't expected to perform miracles with nothing, and they aren't punished or ridiculed when they can't make those miracles happen. The slaves are ignored, which is better than being watched, when the watcher is someone like Dyran. I saw him set one of his overseers an impossible task, make him work to exhaustion, then accuse him of shirking and as punishment order an arranged marriage for the fellow's daughter with another of his underlings who was—well, just vile. I watched him drive another quite mad, then order his wife be taken away and given to someone else as a lady. And at least the slaves of someone like Dyran have mercifully short lives compared to the elven lords. A pensioner can look forward to
centuries
of that kind of treatment."

Kelyan nodded all through Mero's explanation. "Exactly right, halfbreed—" He paused, and tilted his head in inquiry. "Sorry, I've forgotten your name. You're very quiet—"

"Mero," the wizard supplied, and smiled. "They called me Shadow; I
am
very good at making myself ignored."

Kelyan gave him a nod of acknowledgment. "Mero, then. Yes, exactly right. There were plenty of Dyran's slaves who would look at
me
with pity in their eyes—and my father, too, before he worked himself into a premature senility." He sighed. "Well, needless to say, there are—or at least there were, when last I walked civilized lands—plenty of younger elves who would be only too happy to find a way to limit the High Lords' magic. And given enough time to think about it, there are probably any number of them who could find it in their hearts to sympathize with the wizards. And actually, now that I've had a taste of being a slave myself, I even find it in my heart to sympathize with the humans." He quirked another of his ironic smiles. "At least Dyran met a nasty end. I will sleep
very
peacefully tonight, knowing that."

He would have said more, but another of the warriors appeared at the door to the tent, pushing the flap aside and gesturing peremptorily. Kelyan made a face, and got to his feet, prodding Haldor with a toe. "Come on, old thing," he said with resignation. Time for our performances. Our masters are awaiting us."

Haldor just grunted again, got to his feet, gathered up his chain, and followed Kelyan out.

"Want to watch?" Shana said to Mero in an undertone. "I really have got to see what it is they're doing. Especially if we're going to be expected to do the same."

He shook his head.

"I'll go with you," Keman offered.

"I'll stay with Mero," Kalamadea said. "You two go see what you can see; we'll see if we can come up with any plans."

Shana didn't need a second invitation; she gathered up her chain and followed the two elves, Keman on her heels.

Just as Kelyan had told her, no one tried to prevent either of them from following the two elves as long as it was obvious they were not trying to escape. The elves didn't go far, only to about the third circle. Their destination was a tent—a real tent and not a tent-wagon, the kind Shana remembered the caravan-traders using, only much, much bigger. She reflected that it must have taken a dozen people working together to put this up. As they neared it, colored lights played on the tent walls from inside, and music drifted through the quiet night air.

The elves went inside; Shana and Keman followed them.

They stopped just inside the tent flap, which was tied open. Inside, it had been furnished much like Jamal's tent; there were painted hangings decorating some of the walls, rugs forming a floor, and large piles of cushions for people to sit or recline on. At one end was a group of musicians; at the other, someone dispensing food and drink. Servers brought both to the men and women who were dispersed about the tent. Most of them had the look of fighters; most were relatively young. Some sat or reclined, eating, talking, or playing games of chance. Some danced to the tune the musicians played.

But most were drifting toward the musicians' end of the tent where the elves had just arranged themselves.

"What do you suppose they're up to?" Shana wondered aloud.

"I haven't a clue," Keman told her. "But we ought to see if we can't get nearer."

They worked their way through the crowd; carefully, trying to attract no attention to themselves. They managed to get into a corner where they had a good view, but were out of the way.

The musicians finished their current piece, and stopped, clearly waiting for the elves to settle themselves. There were six musicians: two drummers, two with string instruments, one with a horn, and one with something Shana couldn't identify. Kelyan took a comfortable position, and nodded to the head musician, the one with the horn, who started a new piece. He played the first phrase alone, and the others joined in after a few beats.

That was when Shana understood why the riders were so intent on keeping the elves as their captives.

Kelyan spun a complicated illusion of fantastic birds and creatures with the bodies of lithe young females and males, but with butterfly wings. He danced them around each other in time to the music, to the evident pleasure of the watching riders. It wasn't a very good illusion; the birds and butterfly-creatures were quite transparent, easy to see through, impossible to believe in. But as an artistic piece, and as entertainment, it was excellent.

Certainly it was something the riders would never have been able to produce for themselves.

When the piece ended, the illusion faded. Haldor sat up, face full of resignation, as the next piece began. His illusion, like Kelyan's, was a frail thing and quite transparent, but his tiny horses of flame, darting and rearing and galloping in the air, were quite mesmerizing to watch.

Shana tapped Keman on the elbow and inclined her head toward the less crowded part of the tent as Haldor's piece ended. He nodded agreement, and they made their way to the end nearer the open doorway.

"Before you ask—I can't work any magic on the collar itself, and I'm not certain I can shift," Keman said quietly. "Kalamadea and I have tried; I think it may be something in the collars."

She made a face of distaste. "Well, the elves manage it; I don't see why these people couldn't, too. Oh, fire and blast it! At least none of them know our tongue; it's easier talking man thinking at you."