The Silver Mage (58 page)

“I have to scry,” Salamander said. “Do you know what that is?”

“I do. Mama does it sometimes. I’ll be quiet, I promise.”

“Well and good, then.”
So!
Salamander thought.
That wretched Arzosah knows a fair bit more dweomer than she’s ever admitted.

Overhead a few wisps of clouds were sailing in from the east. Although the sun had set behind the western hills, casting the meadow and the tower into shadow, the sky above still shone brightly with blue. Salamander lay down on his back and fixed his gaze upon them as he invoked the powers of Air. The vision of the army—a vision he could trust, this time—built up fast.

He saw immediately that his earlier dream had shown him truth. The army had spread out into a wide but thin scatter of men and horses. The rakzanir and the Keepers still stalked among them, but now the Keepers carried long spears to threaten those who disobeyed with the worst punishment of all. Salamander saw, in fact, one man already stripped naked and impaled, still alive and screaming, down by the river. Although Salamander couldn’t hear him, he could read the victim’s agony from his contorted face. A few more examples such as that, and no doubt the rakzanir would regain control of their men.

The priestesses were another matter. They had withdrawn a good half a mile away from the main army and taken many of the servants and supply carts with them. As he watched, Salamander saw a troop of some hundred fighting men ride up. His heart pounded—what were they going to do to the women? Nothing, as it turned out, but join them. Their leader knelt before the head priestess, who laid her hands on his head in blessing. A few at a time, other men slipped away from the army and took refuge among the white dresses and white mules of Alshandra’s Elect.

Although he wanted to see more, Salamander’s exhaustion cost him the vision. He returned to normal sight to find the clouds above dyed pink by the sunset off to the west. Devar still crouched nearby, but just as Salamander sat up again, they both heard the drumming of wings, a slow booming in the air as the burdened Rori flew back with two deer, one in his front paws, the other dangling from his mouth.

“Dinner!” Devar leaped up and with a rustle unfolded his wings.

“You go eat,” Salamander said. “I need to find firewood so I can cook my share.”

“Medea got you some. It’s in the tower.”

Devar bunched his muscles, stretched his wings, and leaped into the air. He landed on the ledge above a moment before his father dropped the two deer upon it. Medea and Mezza came waddling out of the cave, chattering in Dragonish, to join the meal. Rori landed among them and began apportioning the venison.

Salamander got to his feet—slowly—and staggered to the empty doorway of the tower. Inside, leaning against the wall, stood an entire dead pine tree, crisp with orange needles. Fortunately—since Salamander had only a small hatchet in his gear—a number of branches had fallen off, and a reasonable amount of splinters and dead bark lay around as well. Salamander got the impression that Medea had simply dropped the tree into the roofless tower from a great height.

Still, it made good fuel. Salamander had a decent fire going by the time Rori glided down to the meadow. His brother laid a mangled-looking haunch of venison, still wrapped in its original owner’s hide, down in the grass.

“It’s a bit gnawed around the edges,” Rori said. “I can’t handle a knife, of course, to disjoint anything cleanly. My apologies.”

“No need. I’ve had naught but soda bread to eat for days, and this will be splendid stewed, gnawed or not.”

Salamander skinned the haunch, then cut down to the tender meat by the bone. He set chunks to simmering in his cook pot, then tried roasting a slice threaded on a green stick. The result was edible if tough. After he ate, he could think of nothing but sleep. He forced himself to stay awake until the rest of the meat had cooked, then put out his fire and lay down.

In the morning the rising sun woke Salamander. He had to struggle to sit up; his sore muscles had turned so stiff in the night that he could barely get to his knees. When he looked down at his arms and hands, he realized they’d turned a mottled red and purple. The bruises had come out in the night, transferred slowly from his etheric double, unlike the normal, immediate bruises caused by physical blows. That his face had suffered damage so quickly showed him just how much danger he’d been in. He shuddered retroactively and reminded himself that he’d survived.

Eventually, he got to his feet. When he looked up at the cave, he saw no sign of the dragons. He took an experimental step toward the spring and found that he ached in every joint, but the more he moved, the more he was capable of moving. By the time he’d made soda bread and eaten it with cold stewed venison, he felt restored enough to scry.

In the upwelling spring, by the powers of Water, Salamander summoned images of the Horsekin army, or, as it turned out, of the two armies. The priestesses had gathered several hundred fighting men around them, as well as a good many servants and slaves. As Salamander watched, this gathering of the devout mounted up. With the chief priestess on her white mule at their head, they started off—north. They were leaving the main body and marching off the way they’d come, heading home.

Grinning like a fiend, Salamander turned his attention to the main body, which was also preparing to move out. Most of the fighting force remained under the control of the rakzanir, though they were leaving some twenty men behind them, dead on the long spears, the price of restoring order. In a reasonable show of discipline, the army began to ride southward, still intent on reaching Cerr Cawnen, or so Salamander could assume.

Salamander broke the vision, then used the spring as a focus to contact Dallandra. Her image floated upon the water and smiled at him.

“I’m glad to hear from you,” she said. “I’ve been worried, and—wait!” The smile disappeared. “Ye gods, what happened to your face?”

“I was forced to rejoin my physical body a bit hastily,” Salamander said. “But I reached it, and it’s still here intact, more or less.”

Dallandra’s image rolled her eyes, but she listened intently as he described his work with the Alshandra image.

“So I’ve managed to throw some confusion into their ranks,” Salamander finished up. “The army must be well and truly demoralized to have their priestesses hare off without them.”

“I should think so.” Dallandra smiled again. “Good. You’ve certainly managed to slow them down.”

“Have you scried for Dar and his escort recently?”

“I have. They’re nearly here, but, of course, we’ll need time to get the refugees well clear of the city. Most of the folk have been packing up their goods, but there are always people who refuse to believe bad news and, because of that, put off doing anything about it.”

“The name of that kind of person might be ‘Horsekin slave’ if they’re not careful.”

“That, alas, is true spoken. What are you going to do now?”

“Stay here in the tower in Dragon Meadow, or so I’ve been calling it in my thoughts. Rori and Medea will cause the Meradan a bit more trouble while I rest. Rori will bring me back to Cerr Cawnen once Arzosah returns to the lair.”

“I’m glad you’re going to rest. What you did can’t have been easy.”

“No, it wasn’t, much as I hate to admit it. And now, O Mistress of Mighty Magics, it behooves me to break this link. The astral tides are changing, and it’s hard to see your face.”

“Indeed. Contact me again later, if you can.”

Salamander refilled his water bottle and went back to his gear, lying scattered on the ground by the dead fire. He knelt to tidy it up, then paused, looking up at the tower looming above him. How hard would it be, he wondered, to repair the roof and put in an upper floor and some steps to reach it? An idea, or perhaps it was only an image, the glimmer of an idea, was rising in his mind, a few shy thoughts at a time, like the streaks of sunlight breaking over the eastern hills.

Once Rori returned to his human form—or died in the attempt—the Northlands would need this watchtower again to guard against prowling Meradan. Perhaps he could man it, in the company of his dragon nephew and his sisters. Devar would need someone to help him come to terms with his mixed heritage of elven blood.
I could live among dragons,
Salamander thought. At last he could give himself over to the dweomer in the complete and committed way he’d always shunned before. The idea gave Salamander a sense of satisfaction, an intense sweetness of feeling, such as he’d not known since his marriage to Marka, all those years ago in Bardek.

All morning he thought over his idea. Toward noon Rori flew down to join him. When Salamander told him what he was planning, his brother’s oddly human eyes filled with tears. With a growl the silver wyrm shook his head and scattered them.

“This eases my heart,” Rori said in Deverrian. “The one thing that’s been troubling me about returning to human form is leaving Devar. He’s but a lad as a dragon’s life goes. He needs a father—or an uncle.”

“An uncle he shall have, then, assuming Dallandra approves my little scheme. Shall I ask her?”

“If it pleases you, ask away.”

When he let his mind reach out to Dallandra, she returned the contact so quickly that he knew she’d been waiting for him to reach her.

“How are you?” she said. “You were so bruised and exhausted looking that I’ve been worried, but I didn’t want to risk waking you if you were asleep.”

“I’m awake,” he said. “Also full of insight. O Princess of Powers Perilous, I have seen the rest of my life work’s stretch out in front of me like a road.”

“What?” Dallandra’s intense surprise translated itself to his mind as a wave of laughter. “Tell me!”

The tower, the dragons, his plans—Salamander sent their images and words to her in a jumble of excitement and delight. She listened calmly, and he could feel her caution as she thought over what he’d told her, thought it over for a very long time, or so it seemed to him, fearing as he did her disapproval.

“Can you really live alone like that?” Dallandra said at last. “You of all people?”

“Me of all people, indeed. I am sick to my heart of playing the fool, Dalla, of traveling through Deverry with my tricks and tales. And yet, I’ll never feel truly at home in the Westlands, either, nor will I ever be the bard my father wants me to be.”

“Very well, then.”

Salamander waited for her to voice nagging doubts and irritated sneers, but none came.

“You truly mean it, don’t you?” Salamander said. “You approve?”

“You know your own heart best.” Her image smiled at him. “But Valandario was your teacher. You owe it to her to sit down and talk this over.”

“Well and good, then. We can discuss this once we all return to the alar.”

“Assuming, of course, we all do.” Her face darkened. “Well, Dar’s nearly here. The future’s in the laps of the gods.”

T
he prince and his escort rode into Cerr Cawnen late on a damp afternoon. In the sky, gray clouds were scudding away, as if perhaps withdrawing from the royal presence. As the rain slacked off, the occasional shaft of sunlight broke through to dance upon the surface of the steaming lake. From their places on the catwalks, the town watch greeted the prince with a shout and a blare of signal horns. Dallandra, who had been waiting with Jahdo on the lakeshore, hurried down to the south gates of the city. When she looked back at Citadel, she could just make out Arzosah, as black as a raven, circling the lake once, then landing somewhere on the island out of sight—the ruins of the ancient temple, Dallandra assumed.

Daralanteriel led his men inside to the grassy commons, a ring between the town walls and the welter of buildings and crannogs at the lakeshore. When a crowd of townsfolk came running to cheer the men who’d ridden to their aid, a weary, dust-stained Dar acknowledged them with an upraised hand and a grim sort of smile, a gesture that made him look more princely than Dallandra had ever seen him. He was growing into his position in life out of raw necessity, she supposed, more than some instinct of breeding.

“Citizens!” Jahdo called out. “Stand back! On the morrow morn we’ll be gathering up on Citadel, and then will you hear what his highness shall tell us.”

Calonderiel pushed his way through the retreating crowd and reached Dallandra’s side. He, too, looked weary to the bone. He threw one filthy arm around her shoulders and squeezed, then let her go.

“What’s the mood in the town?” he said in Elvish.

“Not panicked,” Dalla said, “which is the best thing I can say. Most people are resigned to leaving. A lot depends on what Dar says on the morrow.”

“It’s going to be a splendid speech. He’s been working on it ever since we left the alar. Devaberiel helped him.”

“Dev’s here?” Dallandra stood on tiptoe and craned her neck, but she could catch no sight of the bard. “At his age—”