The Shining Ones (24 page)

Sparhawk and Vanion looked at each other. ‘What do you think?’ Vanion asked.

‘I don’t see that we’ve got much choice, do you?’

‘Not really. Ulath was right. We can’t sit here all winter, and no matter which way we turn, we keep going toward Delphaeus. The fact that Xanetia’s here is
some
assurance of good faith.’

‘Is it enough, though?’

‘It’s probably going to have to be, Sparhawk. I don’t think we’re going to get anything better.’

‘Kalten!’ Sephrenia exclaimed. ‘No!’

‘Somebody has to do it,’ the blond knight replied stubbornly. ‘Good faith has to go both ways.’ He looked Xanetia full in the face. ‘Is there something you’d like to tell me before I help you up onto that horse?’ he asked her. ‘Some warning, maybe?’

‘Thou art brave, Sir Kalten,’ she replied.

‘It’s what they pay me for.’ He shrugged. ‘Will I dissolve if I touch you?’

‘No.’

‘All right. You’ve never ridden a horse before, have you?’

‘We do not keep horses. We seldom leave our valley, so we have little need of them.’

‘They’re fairly nice animals. Be a little careful of the one Sparhawk rides, though. He bites. Now, this horse is a pack animal. He’s fairly old and sensible, so he won’t waste energy jumping around and being silly. Don’t worry too much about the reins. He’s used to following along after the others, so you don’t have to steer him. If you want him to go faster, nudge him in the ribs with your heels. If you want him to slow down, pull back on the reins a little bit. If you want him to stop, pull back a little harder. That pack saddle’s not going to be very comfortable, so let us know if you start getting stiff and sore. We’ll stop and get off and walk for a while. You’ll get used to it after a few days – if we’ve got that far to travel.’

She held out her hands, crossed at the wrist. ‘Wilt thou bind me now, Sir Knight?’

‘What for?’

‘I am thy prisoner.’

‘Don’t be silly. You won’t be able to hold on if your hands are tied.’ He set his jaw, reached out and took her by the waist. Then he lifted her easily up onto the patient pack horse. Then he held out his hands and looked at them. ‘So far so good,’ he said. ‘At least my fingernails haven’t fallen off. I’ll be right beside you, so if you feel yourself starting to slip, let me know.’

‘We always underestimate him,’ Vanion murmured to Sparhawk. ‘There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye, isn’t there?’

‘Kalten? Oh yes, my Lord. Kalten can be very complicated sometimes.’

They rode away from their fortified cave and followed
the gorge the river had cut down through the rock. Sparhawk and Vanion led the way with Kalten and their hostage riding close behind them. Sephrenia, her face coldly set, rode at the rear with Berit, keeping as much distance as possible between herself and Xanetia.

‘Is it very far?’ Kalten asked the pale woman at his side. ‘I mean, how many days will it take us to get there?’

‘The distance is indeterminate, Sir Kalten,’ Xanetia replied, ‘and the time as well. The Delphae are outcast and despised. We would be unwise to make the location of the valley of Delphaeus widely known.’

‘We’re used to traveling, Lady,’ Kalten told her, ‘and we always pay attention to landmarks. If you take us to Delphaeus, we’ll be able to find it again. All we’d have to do is find that cave and start from there.’

‘That is the flaw in thy plan, Sir Knight,’ she said gently. ‘Thou couldst consume a lifetime in the search for that cave. It is our wont to conceal the approaches to Delphaeus rather than Delphaeus itself.’

‘It’s a little hard to conceal a whole mountain range, isn’t it?’

‘We noted that self-same thing ourselves, Sir Kalten,’ she replied without so much as a smile, ‘so we conceal the sky instead. Without the sun to guide thee, thou art truly lost.’

‘Could
you
do that, Sparhawk?’ Kalten raised his voice slightly. ‘Could you make the whole sky overcast like that?’

‘Could we?’ Sparhawk asked Vanion.

‘
I
couldn’t. Maybe Sephrenia could, but under the circumstances it might not be a good idea to ask her. I know enough to know that it’s against the rules, though. We’re not supposed to play around with the weather.’

‘We do not in truth cloud the sky, Lord Vanion,’
Xanetia assured him. ‘We cloud thine eyes instead. We can, an we choose, make others see what we wish them to see.’

‘Please, Anarae,’ Ulath said with a pained look, ‘don’t go into too much detail. You’ll bring on one of those tedious debates about illusion and reality, and I really hate those.’

They rode on with the now unobscured sun clearly indicating their line of travel. They were moving somewhat northeasterly.

Kalten watched their prisoner (or captor) closely, and he called a halt somewhat more frequently than he might normally have done. When they stopped, he helped the strange pale woman down from her horse and walked beside her as they continued on foot, leading their horses.

‘Thou art overly solicitous of my comfort, Sir Kalten,’ she gently chided him.

‘Oh, it’s not for you, Lady,’ he lied. ‘The going’s a bit steep here, and we don’t want to exhaust the horses.’

‘There’s
definitely
more to Kalten than I’d realized,’ Vanion muttered to Sparhawk.

‘You can spend a whole lifetime watching somebody, my friend, and you still won’t learn everything there is to know about him.’

‘What an astonishingly acute perception,’ Vanion said dryly.

‘Be nice,’ Sparhawk murmured.

Sparhawk was troubled. While Xanetia was certainly not as skilled as Aphrael, it was clear that she was tampering with time and distance in the same way the Child Goddess did. If she had maintained the illusion of an overcast sky, he might not have noticed, but the position of the sun clearly indicated that there were gaps in his perception of time. The sun does not normally jump as it moves across the sky. The troubling fact was not that
Xanetia did it badly, but the fact that she did it at all. Sparhawk began to revise a long-held opinion. This ‘tampering’ was obviously not a purely divine capability. Itagne’s rather sketchy discourse on the Delphae had contained at least
some
elements of truth. There was indeed such a thing as ‘Delphaeic magic’, and so far as Sparhawk could tell, it went further and into areas where Styrics were unable or unwilling to venture.

He kept his eyes open, but did not mention his observations to his friends.

And then, on a perfect autumn evening, when the birds clucked and murmured sleepily in the trees and a luminous twilight turned the mountains purple around them, they rode up a narrow, rocky trail that wound around massive boulders toward a V-shaped notch high above. Xanetia had been most insistent that they not stop for the night, and she and Kalten had pressed on ahead. Her normally placid face seemed somehow alight with anticipation.

When she and her protector reached the top of the trail, they stopped and sat on their horses, starkly outlined against the last rosy vestiges of the sunset.

‘Dear God!’ Kalten exclaimed. ‘Sparhawk, come up and look at this!’

Sparhawk and Vanion rode on up to join them.

There was a valley below, a steep, basin-like mountain valley with dark trees shrouding the slopes. There were houses down there, close-packed houses with candlelit windows and with columns of pale blue smoke rising straight up into the evening air from innumerable chimneys. The fact that there was a fair-sized town this deep in the inaccessible mountains was surprising enough, but Sparhawk and the others were not looking at the town.

In the very center of the valley, there was a small lake. There was, of course, nothing unusual about that. Lakes
abound in mountains in all parts of the world. The spring run-off from melting snow inevitably seeks valleys and basins – any place that is lower than the surrounding terrain and from which there is no exit channel. It was not the fact that the lake was there that was so surprising. The thing that startled them and raised those vestigial hackles of superstitious awe along the backs of their necks was the fact that the lake glowed in the lowering twilight. The light was not the sickly, greenish glow of the phosphorescence that is sometimes exuded by rotting vegetable matter, but was instead a clear, steady white. Like a lost moon, the lake glowed, responding to the light of her new-risen sister standing above the eastern horizon.

‘Behold Delphaeus,’ Xanetia said simply, and when they looked at her, they saw that she too was all aglow with a pure white light that seemed to come from within her and which shone through her garment and through her skin itself as if that pale, unwavering light were coming from her very soul.

Sparhawk’s senses were preternaturally acute for some reason, although his mind seemed detached and emotionless. He observed; he heard; he catalogued; but he felt nothing. The peculiar state was not an unfamiliar one, but the circumstances under which this profound calm had come over him
were
unusual – very unusual. There were no armed men facing him, and yet his mind and body were preparing for battle.

Faran tensed, bunching his muscles, and the sound of his steel-shod hooves altered very slightly, becoming somehow more crisp, more deliberate. Sparhawk touched the big roan’s neck with one hand. ‘Relax,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll let you know when the time comes.’

Faran shuddered, absently flicking his master’s reassurance off like a bothersome insect and continuing his cautious pace.

Vanion looked at his friend questioningly.

‘Faran’s being a little sensitive, my Lord.’

‘Sensitive? That ill-tempered brute?’

‘Faran doesn’t really deserve that reputation, Vanion. When you get right down to it, he’s a good-natured horse. He tries very hard to please me. We’ve been together for so long that he knows what I’m feeling most of the time, and he goes out of his way to match his attitude to mine.
I’m
the one who’s the ill-tempered brute, but he gets all the blame. He behaves like a puppy when Aphrael’s riding on his back.’

‘Are you feeling belligerent just now?’

‘I don’t like being led around by the nose, but it’s nothing specific. You’ve overtrained me, Vanion. Any
time anything unusual comes up, I start getting ready for war. Faran can feel that, so he does the same.’

Xanetia and Kalten were leading them across the meadow that sloped down toward the glowing lake and the strangely alien town nestled on the near shore. The pale Delphaeic woman still glowed with that eerie light. The radiance surrounding her seemed to Sparhawk’s heightened senses to be almost a kind of aura, a mark more of a special kind of grace rather than a loathsome contamination.

‘It’s all one building, did you notice that?’ Talen was saying to his brother. ‘It looks like any other city from a distance, but when you get closer, you start to see that the houses are all connected together.’

Khalad grunted. ‘It’s a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘A fire could burn out the whole town.’

‘The buildings are made of stone. They won’t burn.’

‘But the roofs are thatch, and thatch
will
burn. It’s a bad idea.’

Delphaeus had no separate wall as such. The outermost houses, all interconnected, turned their backs to the world, facing inward with their windowless rear walls presented to the outside. Sparhawk and the others followed Xanetia through a large, deep archway into the city. There was a peculiar fragrance about Delphaeus, a scent of new-mown hay. The streets were narrow and twisting, and they frequently ran
through
the buildings, passing under heavy arches into vaulted corridors which emerged again on the far side. As Talen had noted, Delphaeus was all one building, and what would have been called streets in another town were simply unroofed hallways here.

The citizens did not avoid them, but they made no particular effort to approach. Like pale ghosts they drifted through the shadowy maze.

‘No torches,’ Berit noted, looking around.

‘No need,’ Ulath grunted.

‘Truly,’ the young knight agreed. ‘Notice how it changes the smell of the place? Even Chyrellos always reeks of burning pitch – even in the daytime. It’s a little strange to be in a city that doesn’t have that greasy smoke clinging to everything.’

‘I don’t think the world at large is ready for selfilluminating people yet, Berit. It’s an idea that probably won’t catch on – particularly in view of the drawbacks attached to it.’

‘Where are we going, Lady?’ Kalten asked the pale, glowing woman at his side. Kalten’s situation was a peculiar one. He guarded and protected Xanetia. He was solicitous about her comfort and well-being. He
would,
however, be the one who would kill her at the first sign of hostility from her people.

‘We go to the quarters of the Anari,’ Xanetia replied. ‘It is
he
who must place our proposal before Anakha. Anakha holds the keys to Bhelliom, and only
he
can command it.’

‘You could have saved the rest of us a lot of trouble and made this trip alone, Sparhawk,’ Talen said lightly.

‘Maybe, but it’s always nice to have company. Besides, if you hadn’t come along, you’d have missed all the fun. Look at how entertaining it was to jump off that cliff and lounge around in mid-air with about a thousand feet of absolute emptiness under you.’

‘I’ve been trying very hard to forget about that, my Lord,’ the boy replied with a pained expression.

They dismounted in one of those vaulted corridors near the center of the city, and turned their horses over to several young Delphae. The young men looked to Sparhawk like goatherds who had been pressed into service as stable-boys. Then they followed the glowing woman to a dark-stained door, worn with centuries of use. Sparhawk, still in the grip of that emotionless calm,
looked rather carefully at Xanetia. She was not much bigger than Sephrenia, and, although she was clearly a woman and quite an attractive one, that fact somehow had no meaning. Xanetia’s gender seemed irrelevant. She opened the worn door and led them into a hallway with deeply inset doorways piercing the walls at widely spaced intervals. The hallway was lighted by glass globes hanging on long chains from the vaulted ceiling, globes filled with a glowing liquid – water drawn from the lake, Sparhawk surmised.

At the far end of the corridor, Xanetia paused in front of one of the doors, and her eyes grew distant for a moment. ‘Cedon bids us to enter,’ she said after a brief pause. She opened the door, and with Kalten close behind her, she led them into the chambers beyond. ‘The hall of Cedon, Anari of the Delphae,’ she told them in that peculiarly echoing voice that seemed to be one of the characteristics of her race.

Three worn stone steps led down into the central chamber, a tidy room with vaulted ceilings supported by low, heavy arches. The slightly inwardly curving walls were covered with white plaster, and the low, heavy furniture was upholstered with snowy lamb’s-wool. A small fire burned in an arched fireplace at the far end of the room, and more of those glowing globes hung from the ceiling.

Sparhawk felt like a crude, barbaric intruder here. Cedon’s home reflected a gentle, saintly nature, and the big Pandion was acutely conscious of his chain-mail shirt and the heavy broadsword belted at his waist. He felt bulky and out of place, and his companions, wrapped in steel and leather and rough, gray cloth, seemed to loom around him like the crude monoliths of an ancient and primitive culture.

A very old man entered from the far side of the room. He was frail and bent, and his shuffling steps were aided
by a long staff. His hair was wispy and snowy-white, in his case the mark of extreme age rather than a racial characteristic. In addition to his unbleached wool robe he wore a kind of shawl about his thin shoulders.

Xanetia went to him immediately, touching his wrinkled old face with a gentle hand. Her eyes were full of concern for him, but she did not speak.

‘Well met, Sir Knights,’ the old man greeted them. He spoke in only slightly accented Elenic, and his voice sounded thin and rusty as if he seldom had occasion to speak at all. ‘And welcome to thee as well, dear sister,’ he added, speaking to Sephrenia in nearly flawless, though archaic, Styric.

‘I am not your sister, old man,’ she said, her face cold.

‘We are all brothers and sisters, Sephrenia of Ylara, High Priestess of Aphrael. Our kinship lies in our common humanity.’

‘That may have been true once, Delphae,’ she replied in a voice like ice, ‘but you and your accursed race are no longer human.’

He sighed. ‘Perhaps not. It is hard to say precisely what we are – or what we will become. Put aside thine enmity, Sephrenia of Ylara. Thou wilt come to no harm in this place, and for once, our purposes merge into one. Thou wouldst set us apart from the rest of mankind, and that is now also
our
desire. May we not join our efforts to achieve this end?’

She turned her back on him.

Itagne, ever the diplomat, stepped in to fill the awkward gap. ‘Cedon, I presume?’ he said urbanely.

The old man nodded.

‘I find Delphaeus puzzling, revered one, I must confess it. We Tamuls know virtually nothing about your people, and yet the Delphae have been central to a grossly affected genre in our literature. I’ve always felt that this so-called “Delphaeic literature” had been spun
out of whole cloth by third-rate poets with diseased imaginations. Now I come to Delphaeus and find that all manner of things I had believed to be literary conceits have more than a little basis in fact.’ Itagne was smooth, there was no question about that. His assertion that he was even more clever than his brother, the Foreign Minister, was probably quite true.

The Anari smiled faintly. ‘We did what we could, Itagne of Matherion. I will grant thee that the verse is execrable and the sentimentality appalling, but “Xadane” did serve the purpose for which it was created. It softened and turned aside certain of the antagonisms the Styrics had planted in your society. The Tamuls control the Atans, and we did not wish a confrontation with our towering neighbors. I cringe to confess it to thee, but I myself played no small part in the composition of “Xadane”.’

Itagne blinked. ‘Cedon, are we talking abut the same poem? The “Xadane”
I
studied as a schoolboy was written about seven hundred years ago.’

‘Has it been so long? Where
do
the years go? I did enjoy my stay in fire-domed Matherion. The university was stimulating.’

Itagne was too well trained to show his astonishment. ‘Your features are Tamul, Cedon, but didn’t your coloration seem – odd?’

‘Ye Tamuls are far too civilized to make an issue of deformity. My racial characteristics were simply taken to mean that I was an albino. The condition is not unheard of. I had a colleague – a Styric – who had a club-foot. Rather surprisingly, we got on well together. I note from thy speech that contemporary Tamul hath changed from what it was when I was last among thy people. That would make it difficult for me to return to Matherion. Please accept my apologies for “Xadane”. It is truly abominable, but as I say, it served its purpose.’

‘I should have known,’ Sephrenia cut in. ‘The whole body of Delphaeic literature was created with the sole purpose of fostering a climate of anti-Styric bigotry.’

‘And what was the purpose of the eons of outright falsehood with which ye Styrics deceived the Tamuls?’ Cedon demanded. ‘Was the design not precisely the same? Did you not seek to instil the idea in the Tamul perception that the Delphae are sub-human?’

Sephrenia ignored the question. ‘Does your hatred of us run so deep that you would contaminate the understanding of an entire race?’

‘And how deeply doth
thy
hatred run, Sephrenia of Ylara? Art thou not even now attempting to poison the minds of these simple Elenes against us?’ The Anari sank into a cushioned chair, passing one weary hand across his face. ‘Our mutual hatreds have gone, methinks, too far to be healed. Better far that we live apart. And that doth bring us to the issue which hath brought us together. It is our wish to be apart from all others.’

‘Because you’re so much better than the rest of us?’ Sephrenia’s tone was thick with contempt.

‘Not better, Priestess, only different. We will leave
that
puffed-up sense of superiority to
thy
race.’

‘If you two want to renew a few eons-old hatreds, I think the rest of us would prefer not to sit through it,’ Vanion said coolly. ‘You both seem quite able to manage without our help.’

‘You don’t know what they’ve done, Vanion,’ Sephrenia said with a mute appeal in her eyes.

‘Frankly, dear, I’m not really interested in what happened several thousand years ago. If you want to chew old soup, please do it on your own time.’ Vanion looked at the ancient Delphae. ‘I believe you had some kind of an exchange in mind, Cedon. We’d love to sit around and watch you and Sephrenia slice each other into thin
strips, but we’re a little pressed for time. Affairs of state, you understand.’

Even Sparhawk choked a bit on that.

‘Thou art very blunt, Lord Vanion,’ Cedon said in a coldly reproving tone.

‘I’m a soldier, revered Anari. A conversation made up of spiteful little insults bores me. If you and Sephrenia really want to fight, use axes.’

‘Have you had many occasions to deal with Elenes, revered Anari?’ Itagne asked in an unruffled manner.

‘Almost none.’

‘You might consider offering up a few prayers of thanksgiving for that. The Elenes have this distressing tendency to get right to the point. It’s dreadfully uncivilized, of course, but it
does
save time. I believe you wanted to address your proposal to Anakha. That’s him right there. I should probably warn you that Lord Vanion is the absolute soul of finesse when compared to Sparhawk, but Sparhawk is Anakha, so sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with him.’

‘Since we’ve all decided to be unpleasant this evening, I don’t think we’ll get very far,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you want, Cedon, and what you’re prepared to offer in return? I’ll think it over tonight, and then we can talk about it tomorrow, after we’ve all had time to get a firmer grip on our civility.’

‘A wise course, perhaps, Anakha,’ the old man agreed. ‘There is turmoil afoot in Tamuli.’

‘Yes. We’ve noticed that.’

‘The turmoil is not directed at the Empire, Anakha, but at
thee.
Thou wert lured here because thou hast the keys to Bhelliom. Thine enemies covet the jewel.’

‘We know that too. I don’t really need a preamble, Cedon. What’s the point of this?’

‘We will aid thee in thy struggle, and I do assure thee that without our aid, thou canst not prevail.’

‘You’ll have to convince me of that, but we can talk about it some other time. What do you want in return?’