Zandru's Forge (37 page)

The man had
laran
enough to guide the killer dart, but he could not have created it. Despite the hatred emanating from the man’s mind, Varzil did not think he was the one to plan this attack. He had acted for someone else.

Varzil pressed deeper, and the man’s psychic shields began to give way.

“No! Ye’ll ne‘er trap me that way!” The man spat in Varzil’s face. For a moment, Varzil was blinded by the man’s spittle. He felt Carolin’s recoil of shock, heard the scuffle of the man scrambling to his feet, slipping in the mud, the scrape of wet boot leather on rock. By the time he’d wiped his eyes, Carolin had pinned the man against the knotted roots of an ancient willow. The smell of churned mud and the sweat of fear stained the air.

Varzil caught only a glimpse of the man’s eyes, the instant of wide white despair.

The man’s body stiffened, an arc of agony before he crumbled. He lay against the tree, twisted to one side. The angle of his lolling head and splayed arms gave him the look of a doll tossed carelessly aside.

Varzil did not need to touch the man to know he was dead. The sudden tearing away of the man’s life energy left a fading clamor, like an ill-tuned bell struck but once and then forever-more still. Nausea rose, a noxious river swell in Varzil’s throat. He turned to the water, retching.

“Bredu!”
Carolin’s voice pierced the waves of sickness.

“I’m all right,” he managed to speak. “Are we far from Blue Lake? I need a secure place where I can examine this man more closely. We must find out who sent him to kill you ... and why.”

Varzil would have wished for a different introduction to Blue Lake. The house and grounds held all the charm and tranquil ity he had seen at a distance. It was the perfect place for an active, imaginative boy to grow up, and in later years, it would offer a sanctuary against the intrigues of the court.

The
coridom
of Blue Lake and the servants who rushed out at Carolin’s arrival stared open-mouthed at the limp body slung over the pack animal. Varzil could tell from the ease and speed with which Carolin’s orders were obeyed how greatly he was loved. These people remembered him as a child, as a youth; nothing he did as a man could shake their trust. They needed no explanations, although it must have been unusual for their master to arrive with a dripping corpse.

Varzil refused to perform his
laran
examination inside the house, where people lived and slept, nor the barn with its flammable materials. The little stone-walled building used for making ale and cider was lined with racks of bottles, empty barrels, and glass containers. It smelled of apples and its clean dirt floor. A burly man in a farrier’s leather apron picked up the dead man as if he weighed no more than an empty saddle and carried him inside.

It was a simple matter to clear off one of the worktables and lay the corpse upon it. His clothing and hair were still damp. Varzil opened the shutters to admit more light, happy that he would not need a candle.

Carolin stood in the doorway. “I don’t like leaving you alone with him.”

“It’s safer this way,” Varzil said. He did not want to add that any distraction, no matter how inadvertent, could risk his own life, if not his sanity. “Go and greet your people. I’ll be along as soon as may be. The longer I delay, the less information I can recover.”

And the farther into the Overworld I must search
...

Varzil drew up one of the three-legged stools so that he sat level with the man’s head. He unwrapped the dart, inert now, and laid it where he could easily reach it.

The man’s body was almost cold and had begun to stiffen. His face was purpled with blood from having been carried face-down across the
chervine’s
saddle. Nothing could be read in his features, no clues as to what sort of man he had been in life. His hands and forearms bore the pattern of calluses and scars typical of a mercenary or adventurer. He wore no amulet or other jewelry, nor any identification papers in his folded belt. Varzil and Carolin had searched the river area briefly for some trace of a horse, but found nothing. The man might have been waiting there for days. As Carolin had pointed out, he had made no secret of his intention to visit Blue Lake. His departure had been delayed a few days by the funeral.

Varzil took out his starstone, holding it in his cupped hands. Closing his eyes, he focused his attention through the stone. Within a few minutes, its familiar pulsating warmth spread through his mind.

He laid his fingertips on the man’s exposed wrist, where once he would have felt a living pulse. The flesh still retained the imprint of that rhythm, leading inexorably to the man’s heart. Just as a physician might trace the physical vessels, now Varzil used the same pathways to follow the dead man’s mental energy.

Fleshly decay had hardly begun. The chill of the river had delayed its onset. The man’s energon nodes and channels had shut down, but their structure as yet remained intact. Sometimes, Varzil knew, when a person died suddenly, the spirit often lingered for a time. He had hoped such would be the case, but now, as he went deeper and farther along the pattern of energy channels, he felt no trace of any consciousness. The utter absence struck him as unusual. The man had been dead some hours, true. In even a natural death, there should be some imprint of personality, some persistent attachment to living. Unless ...

Unless the man knew he was going to die. Unless he
meant
to die.

Varzil wondered if he were looking at one of the fabled Aldaran assassins, mentally implanted with a suicide command should their mission fail. He wasn’t even sure whether they existed or were a product of the distorted legends from the Ages of Chaos. Stranger things had been proven true.

Varzil did not think this man was one of them. The man had directed the
clingfire
dart and died before he could be questioned, but he didn’t seem skillful or ruthless enough. Thoughtfully, Varzil touched the dart. It had been made by other hands. Dalereuth, perhaps, or some renegade Tower. This man had enough
laran
to guide it to a target, but nothing more.

Closing his eyes again, Varzil slipped into the Overworld. He had always found the transition disorienting, though his teachers assured him he did it more smoothly than most. Now he stood on a featureless gray plain, blinking in the diffuse unchanging light.

The Overworld was composed of mental material, not ordinary, familiar earthly components. As such, this mind stuff could be shaped by thought. Now Varzil gathered it up, forming a tall obelisk like a finger pointing to the pallid sky. On each of its four sides, he visualized an incised picture—the manor house here at Blue Lake, a grazing horse, the ancient gnarled willow by the river, Carolin’s sword. These symbols, images of real things, would create an anchor here in this place where time and space lost all meaning.

The form which Varzil took in the Overworld resembled his actual physical body. As usual, he clothed himself in the loose robe he wore for Tower work. He clasped his starstone and used it to call up the pattern from the chip in the
clingfire
dart. It wasn’t a complicated pattern, nothing like a functional matrix stone. Yet because the dead man had been in some way linked with it, it resonated with his own personality.

Working carefully, Varzil was able to tease out the impression of the dead man’s mind. Some instinct held him back from calling out directly. It was never entirely safe to have dealings with the dead.

Instead, Varzil used the trace as a guide. He slowly turned in each direction, making a complete circle. Searching ...

Toward the end of his circuit, he sensed a ripple of invisible colors. Once, on the edge of the Dry Towns, he had seen distortions caused by heat rising above the wind-smoothed sand. It had looked like water, but Kevan called it a mirage.

Grayness flickered, beckoning. He willed it to come closer, knowing the futility of trying to approach anything so evanescent here in the Overworld. Even things that appeared solid might retreat, tantalizingly just beyond reach. He had heard tales of the unwary, rushing about after departed loved ones, lost and desperate, until their physical bodies withered to lifeless husks.

The twist of colorless light steadied, separating into black and white. Varzil held the images firmly and waited for more detail to emerge ... diamond shapes upon a hanging banner and beyond it, the ghostly lineaments of a wall. A fort or castle, he thought, or the remnants of one. The tracery of stone and wood felt like memory rather than dream.

He raised his starstone to eye level and peered through it at the shadowy form. The castle solidified and seemed larger as well. A man stood before the wooden gate, wearing the battered leather vest of the assassin. He looked very much as Varzil had seen him. As if sensing Varzil’s presence, he turned to glance behind. The door swung open.

The man raised a fist and shook it in Varzil’s direction. “I may have failed, but the cause lives on. Death to the Hasturs! We will be avenged!”

Varzil leaped forward. He was too late, for the man darted into the opening just before the wooden gate slammed shut. The castle vanished instantly.

Panting, sweating, Varzil found himself back in the stone hut at Blue Lake, with no more idea of who had sent the assassin than before.

The
coridom
took care of disposing of the assassin’s body. Varzil sat up with Carolin long into the evening, talking about what had happened. A fire had been laid in the comfortable sitting room, though the night was mild. The household had gone to great lengths to welcome its master, and it had taken most of the evening to find a moment of quiet. Even so, Carolin had had to kindly ask the
coridom’s
wife, who remembered him as a lad, to please leave them to their talk.

Carolin was clearly bent on dismissing the attack as the actions of a madman. Varzil fought his rising anxiety, trying not to say,
Someone tried to kill you. It is not the first attempt. Next time, they might succeed.

“If you’re thinking about Eduin, I won’t hear of it,” Carolin responded to Varzil’s unvoiced thought. “The incident with the starstone was an accident, a misunderstanding. I said once that the two of you were going to have to work out your grievances, but I didn’t mean using me as the battleground.” He sat back in the huge, upholstered chair that clearly had seen better days, one hand unconsciously tracing the embroidered pattern of castles, sword ivy, and rosalys.

Varzil bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Deliberately, he avoided mentioning the fall in the orchard at Arilinn. It had been a long time ago. Perhaps Carolin was right about Eduin after all....

“What about the black-and-white banner?” he said, unable to give it up entirely. “And the words,
We will be avenged?
This attack was aimed at you, the next Hastur King. Who feels themselves wronged by your family? Who harbors such bitter hatred?”

“Let go of it, Varzil, before you drive both of us mad!” Carolin straightened in his chair. “Don’t you understand? Even a King who is loved has enemies. It’s one thing to exercise prudent care, and quite another to see evildoers in every shadow. If I insisted on tracing every possible threat to its very end, I’d never do anything else!”

“Carlo, if anything happened to you—”

“Bredu.”
In a lightning move, Carolin reached out and captured one of Varzil’s hands between his own. Varzil, who knew only the rudiments of swordsmanship and had spent little time around fighting men, had not realized just how quick or powerful his friend was.

“Would you have me cripple myself trying to prevent every conceivable catastrophe?” Carolin said. “Life must be lived on its own terms, and part of being a Hastur, let alone a king, is the ongoing risk. Not what you face in the circle—” Here he gave a quick grimace that brought an answering smile from Varzil. “—but others. I have been born and trained to those risks.”

Varzil caught the unspoken thought. How would he react if Carolin fretted every time he joined a circle or linked with one of the matrix screens that made possible the complex, sophisticated work of the Towers?

Relenting, Varzil slid his hand free and placed it on top of Carolin’s. “Once you said there were two kinds of power—that of the world and that of the Tower. I fear I have been guilty of attempting to judge one from the vantage point of the other. Yet we must have both, if we are to succeed with our dream of a new Darkover.”

Despite Varzil’s lingering misgivings, the journey from Blue Lake to Hali and then back to Arilinn was one of the most joyous times of his life. Without the urgency of the funeral, he and Felicia enjoyed a leisurely pace. He did not speak of the assassination attempt or his venture into the Overworld, although they weighed heavily upon his thoughts. Felicia had her own burdens; he would not add to them.