The Gold Falcon (59 page)

As well as Honelg’s riders, the men from the village were patrolling on the walls or sitting in the great hall. Salamander recognized Marth the blacksmith, giving orders to a contingent of younger men as they stowed bales and barrels of provisions inside the dun. Out in the stables he saw cows and hogs instead of horses; apparently Honelg had sent his riding mounts away to some safe pasture. But Salamander never saw the herald, nor any sign of a beribboned staff. The dun’s women had shut themselves up in the women’s hall. He saw Adranna weeping, and the aged Lady Varigga apparently comforting her, holding her hand and speaking gravely, but he could hear nothing of what she said.

As the long summer twilight deepened, Salamander gave up his futile watch and went to find Dallandra. The two princes and the gwerbret had agreed that the Westfolk archers were such an important weapon that they should pitch their tents well behind the lines of the be sieging army. No one wanted to lose them to a unanticipated sally from the dun by a desperation squad. They’d found reasonably flat ground along a rivulet for the tents, but near an outcrop of rock from which sentries could see Honelg’s dun. Between them and it stood the Red Wolf encampment, also set back, while Ridvar and Prince Voran had disposed their men in the actual siege line circling the dun’s defenses.

Salamander wandered among the tents, asking the archers if they’d seen Dallandra, but none had. Finally, he met up with Calonderiel at the big campfire in the middle of the encampment.

“Where’s Dalla?” Cal said. “Do you know?”

“I don’t,” Salamander said. “I was hoping you did.”

Calonderiel made a growling sound under his breath. “One of the men tells me that she might have gone to the Roundear camp to talk with Voran and the other lords. I’m on my way to look for her.”

“Good idea. And if I see her first, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

“Please do. I hate it when she just wanders off like this.”

Eventually, when the twilight had faded into night, Dallandra returned to the elven camp with Calonderiel shooing her along in front of him as if he were a sheepdog and she the prize ewe. Salamander hurried to meet them.

“Ah, there you are!” he said. “I see that Cal found you.”

“I was merely speaking with Ridvar and the princes.” Dallandra shot Cal a poisonous sort of glance. “I gave them some ideas on how Lord Oth might root out the Alshandra worshippers back in Cengarn.”

“I suppose it’s necessary,” Salamander said.

“Of course it is!” Cal joined in. “Do you want someone there to send a warning to Zakh Gral?”

“No, of course not. I doubt if anyone could, though. Most of them are probably servants, like Raldd the groom, or maybe some of the town’s craftsmen and the like, no one with the horses or the knowledge to find Zakh Gral.”

“Still, I refuse to take even the least bit of risk,” Dallandra said. “If the gwerbret hangs a hundred traitors when he gets back, that’ll be a terrible thing, of course, but I’ll do what I can for them then.”

“By the Black Sun herself! You’ve turned ruthless lately.”

“Of course.” Dallandra set exasperated hands on her hips. “Ebañy, don’t you realize what’s at stake here? Our very survival as a people out in the grasslands, that’s what. If we fail, if the Horsekin take over the plains, then the only elven culture left will be in the islands, and the only Westfolk left will be the ones who manage to reach those islands as refugees.”

For a moment Salamander couldn’t find the words to speak. “I see it now,” he said at last. “Somehow I hadn’t wanted to see it so clearly.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you for that,” Dallandra said. “Fortunately, Prince Voran and Ridvar both realize that if we fall, their western provinces will be next. They’re planning on fighting the Horsekin with every weapon they have. Voran just assured me that his father—that’s the high king himself—will see that the matter’s urgent. And that’s the only thing giving me hope.”

“Hope?” Calonderiel said. “Of course, but it’s also bringing obligations. Do you realize that, my darling? Prince Dar will be beholden to the Deverry high king from now on.”

“So?” Dallandra said. “Better beholden than dead.”

Cal laughed. “True,” he said. “You’re quite right.”

“You know,” Dallandra went on, “no doubt Dar could use your advice about handling our part of this siege. I have work to do in our tent. Ebañy, why don’t you come with me?”

“Now just wait,” Cal snapped. “What kind of work?”

“Dweomerwork. I wouldn’t need privacy for anything else.”

“Privacy, is it? With Ebañy right there?”

Dallandra merely stared at him for a long puzzled moment. Salamander, however, felt like running and hiding somewhere, anywhere, from the cold, suspicious look that Cal was giving him.

“Please,” Salamander said feebly, “don’t tell me you’re jealous of me.”

“Of course not!” Cal snarled and crossed his arms over his chest. “I just want to know what she wants with you.”

“His dweomerlore, you idiot!” Dallandra laid a firm hand on Cal’s shoulder. “I have to scry, and he knows what to do if something goes wrong.”

“Oh.” Cal considered this for a moment. “I tend to forget that you’ve got dweomer, Ebañy. You play the prattling fool so well.” He turned on his heel and stalked off.

“I sincerely hope he gets over this fit, seizure, or spasm of unfortunate emotion,” Salamander said, “or my life is going to be difficult. Difficult? Not that alone! It might even be shorter than the gods intended.”

“He wouldn’t dare harm you. He knows that we need every bit of dweomer we have if we’re going to win these battles.”

“How nice to be useful! But I’m grateful, mind.” Salamander mugged relief and wiped his brow with an exaggerated wave of one hand. “On to the work ahead! I take it you want me to guard your body while you’re off scouting.”

“Just that. We’ve got to take a good look at that wretched temple.”

 

On the way to her tent, Dallandra saw Neb, hailed him, and brought him along. He would have the important duty of sitting directly outside of the tent door and keeping out anyone who might want to enter, including Calonderiel.

“I’ll gladly try,” Neb said, “but I fear me that Cal won’t listen to a word I say.”

“Then stand up and block the door,” Dallandra said. “If you need to, summon Wildfolk and threaten him. I love him dearly, but I cannot be disturbed. Tell him that if he comes charging in, he could break my concentration and kill me.”

“Is that true?” Neb sounded shocked.

“It is. Very true.”

“Then don’t worry.” Neb laid his hand on the hilt of his table dagger. “No one will get past me.”

“Good. Come on, Ebañy.”

Once inside, Dallandra made a ball of light, then flung it to the center of the roof of her tent, where it stuck, glowing silver. Shadows danced around the circling walls. Salamander knelt on the floor cloth and stared at the flickering play of light.

“I see Govvin,” he said after a moment. “Not much else, but I do see Govvin. He’s lying on a pallet of straw on the floor of what appears to be a tiny chamber. There’s a candle lantern burning on a table near the bed, if you’d call that miserable heap a bed. He’s lying so still that I’d say our priest was asleep, but his eyes are open.”

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“No. I can see his bony ribs rising and falling.”

“He might well be exhausted from this morning.”

“Or in trance?” Salamander turned to her.

“Maybe. Let’s find out.”

Dallandra lay down on her blankets, and Salamander moved over to kneel at her head. She crossed her arms over her chest, then slowed her breathing to a steady rhythm. First, she summoned the mental image of a silver flame. She visualized it so clearly that it seemed to be glowing in front of her rather than in her mind. Slowly, she enlarged the flame until it became the height of a tall woman, glowing above her, fed by her own life-energy, streaming from her solar plexus like a silver cord. At that point the image had become her body of light.

Dallandra transferred her consciousness over to the body of light. She imagined herself looking out from a silver hood, as if the flame were a cloak she wore. She heard a strange hissing sound, a click. It seemed that she floated within the flame and looked down at her sleeping body, lying far below, and Salamander, encased in his pale gold aura. Behind her, the silver cord paid out like a fisherman’s line as she rose higher, swooped through the tent roof, and out into the open night.

Above the stars hung close, vast silver globes that echoed her body of light. The encampment far below blazed red and gold from the auras of the men inside it. On Honelg’s dun walls a gleam of auras rose from the archers on guard. The stone, the rocky hill, all the dead things in both dun and camp looked black, so black in fact that they seemed more like shapes cut out of the very fabric of life than objects with an existence of their own. All around them the grass, trees, and other vegetation shone a dim reddish brown.

Dallandra swept away from the camp and headed back along the road to the fortress of Bel. When it came into view, looming on its squat hill, she paused to study it. Here on the etheric plane, its stones loomed black and dead, but the timber of the actual temple inside the walls displayed a faint reddish light, like the last gleam of a sunset, indicating that the temple’s wood had been cut fairly recently. She saw no astral dome, no seals of blue light, nothing that would indicate the presence of dweomerworkers inside, whether they followed the light or cherished the darkness.

Cautiously, slowly, she drifted closer. She saw no one outside in the dun’s ward, not that she worried about the usual kind of sentries, those whose consciousness lay on the physical plane alone. She was expecting an etheric challenge, should a dark master be dwelling there, but no inverted pentagrams shone to ward away the dweomer of light. She wove herself a shield of bluish etheric substance, just in case a dark master should suddenly appear, clothed in lurid images of evil instead of a body of light.

Closer, closer—no one rose up to threaten her, yet it seemed she could sense—something. Arzosah had told her that above the temple itself the etheric forces seemed to be beating like a heart. Dallandra had no idea of what such an image might mean; etheric forces in her experience swirled, flowed, or occasionally spurted up and twisted like waterspouts, but she’d never seen any throb. Yet, as she drifted over the dun walls, she could see, high above the temple, an area, roughly circular, where the silver blue etheric light brightened, then dimmed, in a fairly regular rhythm.

She paused again, turning to scan all around her for enemies. Again, nothing. She rose higher until she hung in her flame-shaped body just below the pulsing circle, which proved to be the mouth of a tunnel stretching into a bluish-black darkness. Within the tunnel swirled images, strange geometric shapes, human faces, little twisted stars, deformed creatures, flowers and leaves and tendrils, all floating through an indigo haze. Someone had opened a gate to the lower astral plane and left it there, a trap and a danger to any etheric creature, such as the Wildfolk, who might drift into it.

Dallandra moved away from the tunnel mouth, then rose higher until she could look at it from above. Hanging below her, it appeared as a long tube, wide at the mouth, dwindling down and disappearing into a haze at the far distant end. The tube’s surface seemed velvet-soft or perhaps slightly furred, but utterly unnatural in any case. As she studied it, she realized that the far end of the construct was moving, twitching back and forth like the tailtip of an impatient cat. The motion would account for the pulses of etheric force.

But what was it? It was much too complex for a simple astral gate. Her first instinct was to retreat, to return to her body and consult with Salamander and Valandario, but the astral gate was a potentially fatal hazard to the weak creatures whose world it had invaded. Within her cloak of fire she raised the images of her hands and called upon the Light, the pure Light that shines behind all gods, the Light that the dark dweomer hates above all else. She dedicated the working with its name.

All around lay the raw power of the etheric plane. Dallandra sent her body of light spinning in a slow dance, gathering in the blue light the way a spindle gathers in the freshly spun thread. She used the magnetic force she collected to fashion a pentagram, and within the glowing silver points of the inner star of the pentagram she placed the sigils of the elements, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Aethyr. In the center she placed the holiest of names.

“In the name of the Light,” she called out in a wave of thought. “I banish thee!”

With a thrust of will she sent it floating toward the gate. She was expecting the tunnel to simply vanish when the two collided. The pentagram sailed forward, touched the tunnel shape, and burst into black flame. The tunnel exploded.

Force, pure force that burned like acid surged and caught her. She felt her body of light rip and tear as a great wave flung her upward, tumbled her this way and that, threatened to throw her into the stars themselves, or so it seemed to her as she careened this way and that. Her useless shield fell away in tatters. All of her concentration, all of her will went into strengthening the silver cord that linked her to her body, so far below. If that broke, she would be dead beyond recovery. Wave after wave of power, a burning power, battered her. The silver cord was stretching thin. She had no choice but to retreat, to spin away, to follow the cord before it snapped and rush back to her body. The waves of force followed her, burning, tearing.

Someone was coming to meet her, another silver cloak of flame—Ebañy. From his own substance he was weaving a rope of light. He tossed it, she caught it, and she felt his energy flowing toward her, renewing her torn body of light. Together they spiraled down toward the Westfolk encampment. She could see the auras of men, glowing beneath them, and dots of fire between the tents—safety at last. She had just the energy left to look back and see the remains of the tunnel collapsing inward. As they fell, they dissolved back into the blue light. She had closed the gate.