The Gold Falcon (52 page)

Even in the dim firelight Salamander could see Clae blush scarlet. He murmured a brief “my thanks” and stared at the ground.

“This is exactly what I was afraid of.” Salamander said. “Everyone in the dun saw Zaklof die.”

“Zaklof?” Gerran snapped. “Who’s Zaklof?”

“A Horsekin prophet, preacher, and general pro claimer of Alshandra’s cult,” Salamander said. “He impressed Honelg most deeply. In fact, he’s the reason Honelg developed his strange taste in goddesses. Apparently our lord of the Black Arrow wasn’t the only person to wonder how Zaklof could face his death so calmly. From what I heard in town, Zaklof would preach to anyone who asked. He probably made a good many converts.”

“I suppose he would have, curse him!” Dallandra said. “Captain, is there any way to stop this wretched Raldd before he gets to Honelg’s dun?”

Gerran turned to Clae. “When did you see Raldd leave?”

“A long time before they served dinner.” Clae thought hard for a moment. “The sun was about halfway to the horizon, halfway down from noon, I mean.”

“Right when everyone was working the hardest and most frantically on the feast.” Salamander joined in. “He chose well, our Raldd. Clae here is probably the only person who noticed he was leaving.”

“The Lode Star’s reached zenith,” Calonderiel put in. “How far is Honelg’s dun?”

“About thirty miles.” Salamander paused to make a few quick calculations. “There’s a decent road, too, at least for the first twenty, but part of it does run uphill.”

“He’s got two well-rested horses from the royal herd, the best horses in all Deverry,” Gerran said. “No doubt he’s willing to founder them.”

“Which means he’s at least twenty miles away by now,” Salamander went on. “He’ll be at Honelg’s before dawn.”

“You’re saying we’ll never catch him,” Dallandra said.

“I am.” Gerran shook his head in frustration. “We’ve got some sober men and good horses out here, but by the time we saddled up and set out, he’ll have gained a little more distance on us. We’ll have to circle the town, find the road, and follow it in the dark, when he doubtless knows the way.”

“We could ride right into an ambuscade, too,” Salamander muttered under his breath.

“This is a disaster,” Calonderiel said. “Dalla, it means that by the time the gwerbret’s army reaches Honelg’s dun, it’s going to be provisioned for a long siege. I’ll wager he calls up the men of his loyal village, too.”

“No doubt,” Gerran said. “I would in his place.”

Branna had been silently listening to all of this. She’d drawn her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, as if she were trying to make herself as small as possible. From the way her head rested upon them, Salamander could tell that she was half-asleep.

“Branna?” Salamander said. “Hadn’t you better be going back to the dun? The town gates are closed, but if the banadar walked with you, no doubt they’ll let you in.”

“Oh, ye gods!” Branna was wide awake in an instant. “Neb’s going to worry if I don’t get back.”

“True spoken.” Calonderiel scrambled to his feet. “Here, my lady, allow me to escort you up to the dun. There’s a candle lantern around here somewhere, I think. The rest of us should all get some sleep, anyway. We’ve got an early start on the morrow.”

“Just so.” Gerran turned to Clae. “Come along, lad.”

“A moment more of your time, Captain.” Dallandra stood up and joined them. “Will Tieryn Cadryc be sending his womenfolk back to his dun?”

“He will, truly.”

“How many men can he spare for an escort?”

“Only a few, alas. It’s not like we have the entire warband with us.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Do you think they’ll be in danger?”

“I do, though it’s a hard thing to explain.” Dalla glanced at Calonderiel and changed over to Elvish. “I want them to stay here in Cengarn, but I can’t come right out and tell them I’ve had dweomer omens. Can you think of some rational reason?”

“Yes, and it might even be true.” Calonderiel turned to Gerran and spoke in Deverrian. “The Wise One here is worried now that Honelg knows we’re coming. What if he decided to send a fast-moving squad out to circle around our line of march and try to take the women as hostages? Branna and Galla would make splendid ones, to say naught of the gwerbret’s own sister.”

Gerran muttered a few foul oaths under his breath. “I’ll come back to the dun with you,” he said. “Let’s find the tieryn and suggest that the women stay here. I’m sure that Ridvar won’t begrudge them his hospitality. Clae, you go back to the pavilion and get some sleep.”

Until the others had all left and gotten well out of earshot, neither Dallandra nor Salamander spoke. From the tense way she stood staring into the darkness, he could tell that she had something in mind that she’d rather keep to the pair of them.

“Do you think you can scry without harming yourself?” Dallandra said at last. “Tell me honestly.”

“Yes, it should be safe enough,” Salamander said. “Scrying’s always come to me easily, after all.”

“That’s true, yes. Have you ever seen this Raldd?”

“Not that I know of. He’s probably traveling through dark forest by now anyway.”

“Most likely. What about Sidro? Do you think she’d be somewhere near some light?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I can try.”

They knelt beside the little campfire. Salamander fed in a few twigs and scraps of bark, then used the leap of flame as his focus. Thinking of Sidro made him remember how much he hated her, her and those sharp little eyes of hers that had nearly gotten him killed.

The image built up fast. He was seeing her by the light of a single oil lamp on a stone altar. The flickering glow reflected off the obsidian pyramid with sparks of dark fire, a glitter of blackness darting this way and that. Some of the sparks seemed to nestle gleaming in Sidro’s raven-black hair.

“She’s inside somewhere,” Salamander began, “and I suspect it’s the Inner Shrine. I can see her kneeling before an altar. Behind it is a painting of Alshandra, an oddly realistic picture from the little I can see of it, in the Bardekian style called ’perspective’. Sidro has her arms spread out, and she’s mumbling in the Horsekin tongue.”

“She’s in Zakh Gral?” Dallandra was whispering in a soft monotone, lest she break his concentration. “You’re sure of that?”

Salamander let the vision pull back. Under starlight the fortress spread out.

“Yes, very sure.”

When he returned to Sidro, she was still on her knees and still wrapped in what appeared to be prayer. Since he’d never been inside the shrine, her surroundings faded off into mist as soon as he tried to look at any object more than a few feet from her.

“I can’t tell if she’s alone in there or not,” Salamander said. “But on the altar there’s a lamp, and it’s exactly the same kind as they have in Bardek, little pottery things with a wick floating in oil.”

“Bardek?” Dallandra’s voice rang with urgency. “How very odd!”

“Yes, it is.” Salamander broke the vision and sat back on his heels. “That’s enough for now.”

“Why? Do you think Sidro realized you were watching her?”

“No, but I know these people. They can pray for hours on end. There’s not going to be a lot more to see.”

“All right. Those things from Bardek, do you think they traded for them?”

“Not directly, if that’s what you mean. In all the many many years I spent in Bardek, I never ran across anyone who knew that the Horsekin existed, much less traded with them.”

“And it’s not likely that Bardekian trade goods would get all the way north to Cerr Cawnen either.”

“Even if some had, I doubt if any of the folk there would traffic with the Horsekin.”

“That’s true, yes. Now, the Bardekians, they have their own gods, too. Do men as well as women worship goddesses there?”

“Yes. Do you think that’s important?”

“Yes. Alshandra seems to fill some sort of empty place among the Deverry gods, is why. We have our star goddesses, and of course, the Black Sun, but only Deverry women care about their goddess. Men need some contact with the sacred in female form, too.”

“I have to agree with that. I doubt if Alshandra’s caught on in Bardek at all, thanks to their bevy of goddesses. Although, you know, I wonder.” Salamander paused, running over memories in his mind. “There’s a place for her already there. Some Bardekians have a goddess with no name and no face. Sometimes she’s depicted as a woman with a veil drawn across her face. At other times, her statues just have a sort of cylinder for a head. She’s a death goddess. I think she protects the dead on their last journey, or maybe she punishes some of them. No one much likes to talk about her.”

“That’s usual when it comes to death gods. It would be easy for those Bardekians to see Alshandra as one of their own, then.”

“Just so.” Salamander started to get up, then sat back down abruptly. The world was shimmering around him. “I think I’m more tired than I realized.”

“Here, I’ll help you up. You need to sleep. First thing in the morning, I want you to have a look at Honelg’s dun, provided you’re not still exhausted.”

“I shouldn’t have any trouble with the scrying. It’s the first thing in the morning part that troubles me.”

“Well, we’ll see how the muster goes, then. I’ll wake you as late as I can.”

 

Dallandra made sure that Salamander went straight to his blankets in the tent he shared with the archers of Dar’s escort, then returned to her little fire to wait for Calonderiel. She’d been assuming, she realized, both that the mazrak she’d spotted earlier was Sidro, and that Sidro was indeed Raena reborn. That she might be the same soul as Raena was still possible, of course, but not even a dweomer raven could have flown all the way back to Zakh Gral in a single evening on the physical plane. In her day Raena had been able to travel the secret roads, but only because Alshandra had lent her the etheric and astral energies to do so. Without Alshandra, she would need long years of training to fly along those paths. Given her cult’s denial of the dweomer, it was highly unlikely that she’d gotten it.

But if not Sidro, who was the mazrak? The thought of a Bardek lamp on a Horsekin altar and a Bardek-style painting behind it kept returning to Dallandra’s mind. The best case would be that priestesses of the Bardekian nameless goddess had somehow linked up with the Alshandra worshipers, but considering the vast distances between the Bardekian islands and the Horsekin lands, it seemed highly improbable.

The other alternative disturbed her. Most Bardekians were highly civilized, cultured people, not the sort to become religious fanatics or to establish ties with the likes of the Horsekin, but as in all times and lands, some few became general riffraff, criminals, or worst of all, men who followed the corruptions and practiced the evils of the dark dweomer.

But why would a dark dweomerman—the dark guilds only allowed men to join—be consorting with Horsekin? Had some of the dark dweomer practioners fled the legal authorities in their homeland and come north to take refuge among the Horsekin tribes? If so, it was possible that her mysterious mazrak was one of them. But how had he managed to survive, when the Alshandra cult demanded death for anyone working dweomer?

“Too many questions,” she said aloud. “There may be answers in Zakh Gral—if we can take the fort and get at them. If? We have to now. We absolutely have to.”

Soon after, Calonderiel returned with the news that the prince and Meranaldar were still trying to think of some polite reason to leave the gwerbret’s table.

“You know, I even feel sorry for our milksop scribe,” Cal said, smiling. “He was nearly asleep and desperately trying to stay awake. It would be rude, after all, to start snoring at table, and the gods all know that being rude is his worst fear.”

“You
are
mean sometimes!”

“I suppose so.” He cocked his head to one side and studied her for a moment. “You look like you’ve got bad news to tell me.”

“Mean you are, but also perceptive. I’m afraid I do. Branna and I spotted a mazrak this evening, circling above the camp. It can’t be any of the priestesses from Zakh Gral. That means there’s a rogue stallion hanging around this herd, and I don’t know who he is.”

For a moment Cal blinked at her; then he swore with some of the foulest oaths she’d ever heard him use.

“Well,” she said when he’d done, “I felt somewhat the same.”

“Only somewhat, or so I should hope. You must be sure of this, or you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Oh, yes. This mazrak is the real reason I didn’t want Cadryc’s womenfolk out on the road. Tell me, will they be staying in Cengarn?”

“Yes. The tieryn agreed with us instantly, and so did Lord Oth when we asked him.” Cal paused for a long sigh that shaded into a growl. “At least one thing’s gone our way. I suppose it was too much to hope that this campaign would be some nice clean military exercise and nothing more.”

“Apparently it was. This whole situation positively reeks of dweomer, and I’m afraid that some of it might be the worst possible kind.”

 

Much too early by Salamander’s reckoning, Dallandra woke him. Except for the two of them, the archers’ tent stood empty. Apparently he’d slept straight through all the noise of the other men rolling up their bedrolls and gathering their gear.

“They’re waiting for you to get up,” Dalla told him, “so they can strike the tent.”

“Ah, um, urk.” Salamander sat up. “I’ll hurry, then.”

He’d slept mostly dressed; he pulled on his boots and staggered outside to find the first pale gray of dawn a stripe on the eastern horizon. Muttering and complaining, he followed Dallandra down to the riverbank, where the water flowed glimmering from the silver day brightening in a cloudy sky. With such a ready focus, Salamander found the image of Honelg’s dun easily. At first it seemed that he was watching it from a great height, as if he flew over it in bird-form. He could feel danger so urgently, however, that he found himself swooping down, focusing down, until he seemed to be standing inside the ward.