The Simbul's Gift (38 page)

The zulkir had not resolved anything in his mind when a glow returned to Chazsinal's chair.

“Oh, my son,” the dead necromancer moaned. “Oh, my son, it is a terrible thing that you've done.”

“That I've done? To send you off in search of a haunt named Ferrin?”

“Your daughter, Lauzoril. You're teaching your daughter and you haven't set the mark on her heart!”

Before Lauzoril could extract anything further from his distraught father, light swirled around Gweltaz's linen and, with it, the pale and shrunken spirit of a man. The zulkir expected the spirit of a man his own age or older, cunning, wise, and cruel who'd sensed Mimuay's talent, then exploited it for his own purposes. What he got was an apprentice, no older than his daughter, who dropped to his insubstantial knees.

“Mercy, my lord, mercy, I beg you! I would never harm her or you.”

“He lies,” Gweltaz hissed. “He spies on us. He pursues your precious daughter, mighty zulkir, and fills her silly head with
our
secrets.” He spoke a necromantic word and Ferrin's spirit writhed on the crypt floor.

“How did you find her?” Lauzoril demanded.

Locked in Gweltaz's torment, the spirit couldn't answer.

“Release him.”

“He lies, Grandson. He has corrupted your innocent. What more do you need? Let me have him.”

If Gweltaz had been a little less eager. If Gweltaz had not despised Mimuay as female and weak. If Gweltaz hadn't been known to lie more often than not himself. “Release him, Grandfather, or I'll do it for you.”

Tiny flames sprouted from the zulkir's fingers: unsubtle reminders of the damage fire could do to linen bandages. Gweltaz retreated. Lauzoril repeated his question to Ferrin.

“My lord, in the spring, Mimuay found my bones, my skull, and called me back—”

“Lies!” Gweltaz shouted. “We scour the bones Thazalhar heaves up each spring. He is from
outside
, Lauzoril. He is from Szass Tam! And you teaching her wizardry, Lauzoril? And she will teach your secrets to Szass Tam!”

The necromancer surged forward, enveloping Ferrin's far weaker spirit. Again, Lauzoril called on fire to separate them.

“She has a gift, my lord,” Ferrin said. “She called me, but she could call
others.”
By which Ferrin clearly meant the likes of Gweltaz and Chazsinal. “I told her to go to you. That is
all
I did.”

“Lies! Lies! The child is as foolish as her idiot mother.”

Lauzoril considered his grandfather, the spirit Mimuay had called out of an ancient grave and the talent still trapped in Wenne's clever, crippled mind. “How long have you been able to hear her, Grandfather?”

The zulkir got his answer, but not from the dead. The wards at the top of the crypt stairway rang like bells, then fell ominously silent.

Ferrin rose from the floor. “Send her away, my lord. You can, my lord. She is still innocent, my lord. Don't let her come down here!”

Ferrin saved himself with that plea, but Lauzoril wouldn't charm his daughter. He dissolved his wards instead before they did the job they were meant to do and destroyed her.

“Mindless fool!” Gweltaz roared just before Mimuay came through the crypt door.

In the moment of confusion, Gweltaz surrounded Ferrin, subsuming the apprentice's essence. Mimuay let out a scream that began as terror and ended as rage. Lauzoril grabbed her as she started for Gweltaz. His daughter called her friend's name and fought frantically with heels, elbows, and fingernails that raised bloody welts on her father's arms.

Then she stopped and became perfectly still. “He's gone. Ferrin's
gone.”

Lauzoril said a single word in Mulhorandi, the language of the Red Wizards' oldest, darkest magic. He held Mimuay tight, but did not cover her eyes, letting her witness the slow gathering of pinpoint sparks in the center of the crypt. The necromancers pleaded; Lauzoril would
have saved Chazsinal—he'd done nothing to deserve the final death, but futility and waste had been the hallmarks of his father's existence; it was appropriate that they were present when the sparks expanded into an ember sphere that descended on the undead necromancers, consuming every part of them before extinguishing themselves.

“I regret Ferrin,” Lauzoril said when he and Mimuay were together in the dark.

His hands were shaking as he pushed his daughter away and made light. Despite the shaking, he was strangely calm. Fifteen years ago, before he brought his father and grandfather to Thazalhar, Lauzoril had memorized the ancient spell that could destroy them. He'd kept it primed all these years. The emptiness in his mind, in the crypt, didn't seem quite real.

“Who were they?” Mimuay asked, calm and dry-eyed.

“Your grandfather and great-grandfather—
my
father and grandfather. Necromancers. I sent them after Ferrin. He hid from me.
You
hid him from me.”

“He was afraid of you. I kept him in my room.”

Lauzoril nodded and rubbed his chin. “Do you understand what happened here? Why your friend is gone?”

“You destroyed him, Poppa.”

“No, Mimuay,” Lauzoril's voice was very soft, very angry. “I did not; I had decided he was no harm to you or me. Gweltaz, my grandfather, destroyed Ferrin—subsumed him because my concentration faltered and he was able to move freely. My concentration faltered because you battered at my wards and I had a choice: to send you away with magic or dissolve the wards. I'd given you my word I would never touch you with magic. You were where you should not have been, doing what you should not have done. But I kept my word to you. Now do you understand what happened?”

She said nothing, did nothing except return her father's stare. Lauzoril couldn't untangle her thoughts—not without resorting to spellcraft. He could scarcely untangle his own, strung as they were between rage and sorrow.

“It's late,” he said when she had said nothing for longer than he could bear listening. He cast the light as a sphere and sent it toward the door. “We'll talk again later. Not tomorrow or the day after. I'm leaving Thazalhar, Mimuay.”

“I understand, Poppa.”

And she might, but Lauzoril didn't understand her. “I'll be back, Mimuay. I'm going to the Yuirwood, in Aglarond.”

With Rizcarn's return, word had spread among the Cha'Tel'Quessir that they'd be walking tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that. Daytime rest would be infrequent. Nighttime camp would be late and cold. If folk wanted journey bread, they had the rest of day and a night to grind their flour and bake it. A lucky few, the men and women who'd known Rizcarn from
before
, gathered in the center of the camp to mourn Shali of MightyTree, the mother of Rizcarn's son. Everyone else, including Chayan of SilverBranch, found a flatish stone and a roundish one, then got down on their knees and began to grind.

Grinding took the most strength, and the least talent. Mixing flour, leavening, and water, while not unlike combining the reagents for a spell, required a better understanding of cookery than Alassra had bothered to acquire over the centuries, and kneading dough was a mystery she'd never unravelled. So she ground grain throughout the afternoon: wheat and oats from the packs of Cha'Tel'Quessir who traded with farmers beyond the Yuirwood, wild rice and millet other families grew in forest clearings, and ripe nuts that could be knocked loose from nearby trees.

The Simbul ground whatever they set in front of her until her back muscles screamed. In private, she healed herself, then she ground more, wondering how the men and women who didn't have a pouchful of magic kept themselves fed. Her hands were another matter. Scraping them bloody as she ground the grain between her two stones was inevitable, and healing them was impossible if she wanted to maintain her disguise.

By sundown, when the grinding ceased, there was a
little bit of Aglarond's queen in every loaf. She ate her supper—passing on the fresh bread—alone at the edge of the camp, nursing sore fingers, and in a foul mood. Her frayed temper owed more to the weather than her raw knuckles. The wind had shifted to the east—from Thay—hot, heavy, and thick, plastering Alassra's sweaty skin with bitter dust. It did take a weather-witch to know a storm was coming.

The moon and stars hid behind a stifling cloud blanket. A few Cha'Tel'Quessir kept their fires burning. The rest let the embers die once the bread was baked. Like Alassra, they sat, alone and still, watching the mourners at the center of the camp.

The Simbul pricked her finger with her drow sister's knife, adding elven sight to her mage senses. She didn't like what the night revealed. A silver-green aura flickered around Bro's father. She expected to see that aura around the ancient trees and mossy menhirs that were the source of the Yuirwood's protection. She'd never seen it cast by a man—if Rizcarn was a man. Short of seizing him by the shoulders and subjecting him to a wizard's interrogation, the Simbul couldn't decide what manner of creature Bro's father had become.

He was alive. She'd ascertained that with spells from a distance and by subjecting Bro to an examination of his healed wounds that, not coincidentally, allowed her to get close to Rizcarn. If the man had ever been dead, he'd been brought back a long time ago and brought back by a master. Still, Rizcarn wasn't like any other living man she'd met. Their eyes had met and, fearing he had the power to see through her Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise, the Simbul had looked away first.

Alassra couldn't describe what she'd seen and felt without resorting to the word Stiwelen had used in Everlund:
wild
. The longer she watched from her safe distance at the camp perimeter, the more she appreciated the Moon elf's judgment. There was a wildness in the Yuirwood, a wildness in Rizcarn himself, a quality that couldn't be measured by the civilized words for right or wrong, good or evil.

As the defender of a small pocket of civilization, Alassra considered putting a stop to Rizcarn and his Cha'Tel'Quessir, but as the Simbul she nurtured a similar wildness
close to her heart; she waited and watched.

Rizcarn's arms wove the air as he sang a courtship song he must have once sung to Shali. The other Cha'Tel'Quessir in the circle around him couldn't see the silver-green aura, but they felt the magic—especially Bro, oblivious to the sweat streaming down his face, swaying in rhythm with his father's arms as he sang the chorus.

Of course, there was another explanation for the youth's exuberance. Alassra had lost count of the jugs and skins of honey wine the Cha'Tel'Quessir had passed around their circle. Several of the mourners would sleep where they sat. Not Rizcarn; the aura allowed him to drink to no effect.

And not Bro. Alassra herself had seen to that when she examined his wounds. The youth was living fast tonight, thanks to her spellcraft: a self-indulgent, but useful, variation on the warrior's
haste
spell left Bro's bones moving at an unexceptional speed while his gut digested honey wine at a prodigious rate. He was steady on his feet when he started walking toward the bushes.

Alassra followed him at a discrete distance. Spells notwithstanding, Bro wasn't as sober as he thought he was, and she needed to remind him—with a pinch of salt and a strand of his hair—that he was thirsty and needed water before returning to the mourners' circle. She trailed him to the stream where they'd found Lanig's body and watched, smiling, as he not only drank his fill, but stripped to the waist and sluiced off the sweat.

Bro headed back to the camp, shirt sleeves tied around his waist, with Alassra keeping a quiet distance behind him. She heard a twig break, loudly and not by accident. Bro finished the journey alone.

“Storm's coming,” Halaern said from the shadows.

“The question is, when will it get here. The wind's died, but the storm's still in the air. I wonder what's holding it there? Red Wizard magic? The wind's from their quarter.”

“The wind,” Halaern agreed. Where weather was concerned, he was the expert. “But not the storm. The storm's here, my lady. The Yuirwood doesn't like all this magic.”

“All this magic? If the storm's not from the Red Wizards, what magic is there? The Cha'Tel'Quessir baking bread? Rizcarn?”

Halaern shrugged. “Rizcarn and the Sunglade are part of the Yuirwood, but the Yuirwood has many trees. They are not all the same.”

When it suited them, the Cha'Tel'Quessir could be as oblique as any Tel'Quessir. The Simbul could mimic their features, but never their thoughts. Her forester had known Rizcarn; the images she'd gleaned from his memories were more accurate than those she'd gleaned from Bro. How well had they known each other? What would Rizcarn say if Trovar Halaern, elder of Yuirwood, walked into his camp, or did he already know he had the Simbul's forester as an outrider? If Halaern wanted to get a message into or out of the camp, Alassra didn't doubt he could do it and right in front of her eyes.

Alassra's thoughts were always her own, but the silence belonged to both her and Halaern.

“My queen, I serve you as I serve the forest. I would not wish to lose your trust, but there are things I cannot explain.”

He stood farther away than usual, with more reserve, less affection, calling her his queen rather than his friend. She could guess why.

“Have I lost yours, dear friend? Do you watch me do what you would rather I did not?”

His eyes hardened; she'd touched a nerve. “Ebroin is young. His eyes are open, but he's never seen.”

“Until today?”

“I beg you, my lady, have a care for him. You are his first. For him, there will be consequences.”

Halaern knew the consequences because he'd lived them. Alassra suffered a guilty twinge for a situation she did not consider her fault, or at least not entirely her fault. “I do
not
encourage him, Halaern; I did
not
encourage you. I offered friendship, and it was freely taken. I offered laughter, and that was taken, too. If Ebroin knew who Chayan SilverBranch was, he'd run in the other direction.”