The Silver Mage

by Katharine Kerr

  “I will not stand for it,” Dallandra went on. “If I have to, I’ll leave Dari with Sidro and Grallezar and go to live in Cerr Cawnen. Maybe Niffa and I can work dweomer to defend the town, since you’re all dishonorable enough to turn your back on our sworn allies.”

  Salamander and Calonderiel broke out talking at once. Rori silenced them with a deep rumble of laughter.

  “So,” the dragon said, “we don’t want to see Dallandra in Horsekin hands, but the thousands of women and children in Cerr Cawnen don’t matter? I think me she’s beaten us all in this game of carnoic.”

  “Well, ye gods!” Calonderiel snarled. “I suppose having good men die with them will make matters better? Dalla, don’t be a fool!”

  Dallandra choked back the nasty remarks that filled her mouth. She took a deep breath. “If you can’t see reason, then I’m going to just get up and leave.”

  She rose to her knees, but Calonderiel flung up one hand in a gesture that made her pause.

  “Get up and leave.” Calonderiel spoke each word very carefully, as if he’d never heard up them before. “Get up and leave. Sit down, Dalla! You’ve just given me a splendid idea.”

  Dallandra sat as the idea occurred to her as well.

  “So,” Cal said. “What if we move the people out of Cerr Cawnen before the Horsekin get there?”

  The other men goggled at him while the dragon laughed again.

  “Well, by the silver shit of the Star Gods, think!” Cal continued. “Dar, for months you’ve been saying how desperately the Melyn River Valley needs settlers.”

  “So I have,” Daralanteriel said, grinning. “Sometimes, Banadar, you put us all to shame. Do you think they’ll abandon their homes?”

  Everyone looked at Dallandra. “I can’t speak for them,” she said, “but they’re not stupid or mad.”

  “Of course!” Dar turned to her. “This could solve a fair many problems, like building the Falcon dun. I’ve seen their town, you know. The Cerr Cawnen folk know how to build fortifications. And I’ll be needing a winter dun myself, soon.”

  Rori slapped his tail on the ground. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “It may take time to persuade them,” the dragon said. “We’d best slow the Horsekin down to give you that time. Fortunately, my prince, you have allies in the air. Arzosah and Medea will enjoy scattering their horses as much as I will.”

  “No doubt.” Daralanteriel rose, abruptly restless. “But it’s a long way to Cerr Cawnen from here. We’d best get on the road with the dawn. Banadar, we want a fast-moving mounted force with extra horses.”

  “Just so.” Calonderiel got up to join him. “It would take the entire alar at least ten days to reach Cerr Cawnen.”

  “A fortnight, more like, with the herds and flocks,” Salamander said. “It’s still a good hundred miles away, isn’t it? We have to cross a range of hills, too.”

  “That’s why I want a small force. I’m not risking the alar’s children, either, by taking them anywhere near the town and the Horsekin. Carra can lead everyone as well as I can. She can find a safe spot for most the alar to wait while we—” Dar paused to glance at Calonderiel and Dallandra. “—while we travel on ahead. What do you think, Cal? A troop of twenty-five?”

  “That would be a good number, and we should be able to reach the town in five days if we take extra horses. Unless, Dalla, you know a way to get us there even faster.”

  “I can’t open a dweomer road for more than one or two people, if that’s what you mean,” Dallandra said. “With Evandar gone, the roads get more and more unstable. They’re probably not safe for anyone who’s not dweomer themselves.”

  “I see.” Cal considered for a moment more. “I’d ask the dragons to carry some of us there, but frankly, I think we’d best go with a show of force.”

  “I agree,” Dallandra said. “What if the Horsekin send emissar ies, like they did before?”

  “They’ll understand a message delivered by a troop of archers a lot better than fine words,” Cal said. “Even with dragons hovering around.”

  “Quite right,” Dallandra said. “And they’d love to get their hairy paws on Prince Dar. He’ll need guards.”

  “Which brings us back to the point,” Dar broke in. “We need to delay the main army. Can the dragons do that?”

  “We can try,” Rori said.

  Salamander got to his feet. Dallandra had never seen him so grim, with all his fool’s pretense tossed aside. “I need to go north with you. Valandario can receive any messages Dalla sends back. When it comes to harrying the Horsekin, I have the best weapon of all.”

  Calonderiel snorted like an angry stallion and set his hands on his hips. “And what, pray tell, might that be?”

  “Alshandra herself.” Salamander crossed his arms over his chest and stared straight at the banadar. “Or her image.”

  “Oh, splendid idea!” Dallandra said.

  Salamander smiled at her. Calonderiel, however, scowled and opened his mouth to speak.

  “Cal, hold your tongue!” Dallandra got in first. “Ebañy knows what he’s about.”

  “He does?” Cal hesitated then turned to Salamander. “My apologies.”

  Salamander looked so shocked that everyone laughed, including the dragon.

  “You can come with me, Brother,” Rori said. “Arzosah mentioned that you’ve ridden dragonback before.”

  “It was not a pleasant experience, but I have, indeed,” Salamander said. “I suspect it will be easier with you instead of her, however.”

  “It’s likely,” Rori said. “I’ll ask Arzosah to travel with the prince till they reach Cerr Cawnen. Then she can come north to join us.”

  “We’ll be flying straight for the army, then.”

  “Not quite. I want to go to our caves first and fetch Medea. It’s time she learned how to harry an enemy.” Rori rumbled briefly. “And that way you can meet your nephew.”

  Calonderiel slaughtered and skinned a pair of sheep for Rori, who needed to rest rather than hunt. Rather than watch his brother eat raw mutton, Salamander went to his own tent and packed a pair of saddlebags to take north with him. Rori had told him to be ready at the first light of dawn. He’d just finished when Dallandra joined him.

  “Are you riding with Cal when they leave?” Salamander said.

  “No,” Dallandra said. “I’ll be traveling on one of the dweomer roads. I want to reach Niffa as soon as possible.”

  “I see. What about Dari?”

  “I’ll be leaving her with Sidro. She’s too young to wean, but Sidro’s already getting milk. The Gel da’Thae seem to live for motherhood, I must say! Sidro had a child before, you see, and now she’s pregnant again. That and then the amount of time she spends tending Dari has apparently gotten her motherly humors flowing early.” Absent mindedly, Dalla rubbed one of her own breasts through her tunic. “It’ll be a nuisance for me, but for all I know, there’s a woman in Cerr Cawnen who needs a wet nurse. I’ve asked Niffa to look for one.”

  “You’d nurse a stranger’s child?”

  “Why not? Someone else will be nursing mine. I can scry for Dari whenever I want, so it’s not like I’ll have no news of her.” Dallandra’s voice turned uncertain with worry. “Sidro can’t talk mind to mind yet, but I’ll contact Val every day.”

  There were times, Salamander reflected, that he was grateful for having been born male.

  “Very well,” he said aloud, “but I was hoping that I could send Dar warnings, should I see something to warn him about, anyway.”

  “Grallezar’s offered to ride with the prince. Her city had an alliance with Cerr Cawnen, back when she was still head of their town council, and she feels she needs to do something to honor it. Drav and his Gel da’Thae riders will go with her, so the prince will have nearly fifty men to guard him.”

  “Splendid! Now, when I’ve done performing my tricks, I’ll have Rori take me back to Cerr Cawnen, so I’ll see you there eventually, assuming that all goes well.�
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  “Let’s hope it does. You’ll need to husband your energy, you know. If your body of light suffers damage, I’ll be too far away to help you.”

  “I’m entirely too mindful of that. By the by, has anyone told Rori that Laz has the dragon book?”

  “Not yet. I’ll leave that up to you. Doubtless, you’ll have time on the journey.”

  “Most likely.” Salamander paused to consider the pair of saddlebags he was taking on the journey. He’d stuffed them as full as possible, he decided. “When are you leaving for Cerr Cawnen?”

  “On the morrow.”

  “Then good luck to you on the roads. I suspect you may need it.”

  Salamander had touched upon one of Dallandra’s fears, that the remnants of the dweomer roads might prove unstable. Evandar had created most of them, then reinforced their existence simply by passing over them. Wherever he traveled, force poured down from the higher reaches of the astral plane, allowing him to mold it into all sorts of forms, including solid-seeming dirt paths. Upon his death, most had dissolved, because no dweomermaster existed who was powerful enough to renew them. Astral force will mold itself into form easily, but keeping those forms stable over time is another matter entirely.

  Yet, here and there, Dallandra had found some paths still open. She surmised that they had survived by virtue of a direct connection to the mother roads. Whether they existed naturally or had been formed by dweomermasters in some distant past was a question she couldn’t answer. No more did she know what might happen to her if a road should dissolve when she was walking upon it. Nothing good, she assumed.

  Yet she felt that she had no choice but to travel on the remnants of the roads. Although she could transform and fly, her bird form was rather nondescript, a plain gray linnet who flew slowly and lacked stamina. She needed to get to Cerr Cawnen quickly rather than flapping her slow way along over several days.

  Dallandra left the royal alar early in the morning, when the astral tide of Aethyr ran at full force. If necessary, she could draw upon its power to temporarily stabilize a path, or so she hoped. She had packed a pair of saddlebags with clothes and her ritual implements the night before. She took Dari to Sidro, then walked out into the grasslands. She found a rivulet trickling toward a larger stream and followed its course. At the joining of the waters, she opened her etheric sight and saw the shimmering lozenge in the air, just a few feet above the grassy bank, that signified a possible gate.

  Dallandra walked straight toward the lozenge. It swelled at her approach as if in greeting. She took a deep breath, then stepped up and through into a shimmer of pale lavender mist that broke over her like a wave. As the mist cleared away, a cold bluish glare lit her way. She could see that she was standing on a flat outcrop of rock. Ahead stretched an image of another grassland with a gold-colored footpath winding through it.

  In her mind, Dallandra formed images of Niffa and of Citadel. At first they were only brief flashes of memory, but one image stabilized into a clear, if lifeless, picture of Niffa standing near the ruined temple. As Dallandra walked toward it, the image moved away, leading her down the golden path. As it moved, it changed somewhat, adding a budding rosebush beside Niffa and behind her, a view of a kitchen garden. Dallandra walked steadily and fast, keeping her mind focused on the idea of Niffa on Citadel. The scenery around the path changed into a hillside. As Dallandra walked uphill, houses grew up like flowers, and stone walls appeared. Trees shot up to either side of her.

  The image of Niffa suddenly looked straight at her and smiled. “There you are!” she said. Her voice sounded oddly hollow, and the light falling upon her glimmered lavender.

  Dallandra stepped off the path, walked through the lozenge gate, and found herself on Citadel, in the garden of the house Niffa shared with her brother. The sun hung low in the west, sinking toward its setting. As always, what she’d perceived as a few moments on the road had marked the passing of hours in the physical plane. The stench of Cerr Cawnen hit her like a blow to the face. The townsfolk dumped all their refuse into the outrunning river, but they did it where the water still ran warm from the lake. The resulting smell was one thing she wasn’t going to miss about the town.

  “Here I am, indeed.” As her body adjusted again to the solidity of the world of form, Dallandra realized that her breasts were aching. When she rubbed them, milk oozed. “It’s good to see you. Er, did you happen to find someone who needs a wet nurse?”

  “I did, and she be waiting for you inside. One of my brother’s granddaughters, Hildie. Here, let me carry those saddlebags for you. You must a-weary be.”

  Dallandra realized that, indeed, weary she was.

  In the spacious great room of Jahdo’s home, a scatter of finely worked chairs, each cushioned with bright fabric pillows, stood near a pair of windows with actual glass in them. Jahdo had done very well for himself over the years, Dalla realized, trading back and forth with the Gel da’Thae as well as the Mountain Folk. A young blonde woman sat in one chair, holding a baby who fussed and whined. She was trying to get him to suck water from a cloth sop, but the infant would only cry and bat at the thing with one feeble hand.

  “That be Hildie,” Niffa said. “And little Frei. He be some two months now, and her milk, it were scant from the beginning.”

  Hildie looked up with a smile so strained that Dallandra realized that the lass was choking back tears. She decided that formal introductions could wait and strode over to sit down in the chair next to Hildie’s.

  “Give him to me,” Dallandra said.

  When Hildie handed the baby over, he began to wail at this rude transfer to a stranger, but as soon as Dallandra pulled up her tunic, releasing a waft of milk-scent, the wails changed pitch to a demand. She settled him at her breast with a sense of mutual relief. Niffa pulled up another chair and joined them.

  “This be my friend Dallandra,” Niffa said to Hildie, “as doubtless you did guess by now.”

  “So I did, and you have my thanks.” Hildie paused to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “It be a bitter thing, to starve your own child. I do feel so shamed.”

  “Don’t,” Dallandra said. “I never had enough milk for my first-born, but with the second I have plenty. I’ll wager you will, too.”

  “See?” Niffa said. “I did tell you, but truly, I do see why you were loath to believe me. I’ve not had a babe of mine own.”

  “Never did I not believe you.” Hildie managed a smile. “It just did no good for the babe I have now.”

  “Well, true spoken,” Niffa said. “Dalla, Hildie will be sheltering here for some days, till it be time for all of us to leave Cerr Cawnen.”

  “Good, that will be convenient all round, then.”

  Grateful for the cushions, Dallandra leaned back in the chair. Feeding the baby made her drowsy, and for those few moments, as she sat listening to Niffa and Hildie gossip about the various members of Jahdo’s large family, the Horsekin threat receded, a disturbance on some far border, perhaps, of another country. Reality, however, shoved itself into her consciousness when Jahdo came down to join them.

  Dallandra hadn’t seen Jahdo since he was a young lad. He’d grown into a slender man, not very tall but not particularly short, and his dark eyes and thinning gray hair had nothing particularly distinctive about them, either. He walked with a pronounced limp, the legacy of a bandit raid on one of his caravans.

  “Good morrow, Dalla,” he said in a voice darkened with age. “The servants, they did tell me you were here.”

  “And a good morrow to you,” Dallandra said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  Jahdo smiled in acknowledgment. “I were a-wondering,” he said, “if it be time to send a messenger down to Penli.”

  Dallandra glanced at Niffa, who answered. “I think it be so. ’Twill take the folk there some days to pack up their goods and the like. Dalla, how soon, think you, that the prince will be arriving here?”

  “Five days, or so he hoped.” Dallandra paused to change the baby t
o her other breast. “I doubt me if they can travel any faster, even with extra horses.”

  “So be it, then,” Jahdo said. “There be no way for me to give their horses wings. And truly, there be much to do here. Tonight I did call a special meeting of the Council of Five. We do need to decide how much to tell the town and when we should be a-telling of it. ’Twere best to have everyone know the truth before Prince Dar does arrive. The folk, they be needing time to chew things over, like.”

  “Just so,” Dallandra said. “And I want to consult with your spirit talker.”

  “Artha, her name be,” Niffa put in. “Werda did go to her ancestors many a year past. I do warn you: Artha does show forth all of Werda’s holiness but few of her wits.”

  On the morrow morning, Niffa and Dallandra trudged up the hill to Citadel’s central plaza, a wide paved expanse at the top of the hill. To the north stood the stone buildings that housed the council and other official doings, and to the south stood a little shrine to the spirits of the lake. Four stone pillars held a roof over a cubical stone altar, laden at the moment with summer wildflowers. Artha’s house lay below it at the end of some wooden steps.

  Dressed in white linen trimmed with white fur, the spirit talker stood waiting for them in the doorway, but rather than let them in, Artha came out to meet them on the grassy flat in front of her door. She was carrying the staff of her office, as well, made of dark wood ringed at intervals with silver. When she held it up as if to bar their way, Dallandra went on guard. She had expected trouble from this quarter, and she got it.

  “I will leave not,” Artha snapped. “Nor may I countenance my folk deserting their gods.”

  “If you stay,” Dallandra said, “you’ll all be killed or enslaved. The Horsekin will never allow the survivors to worship your gods. They believe that their Alshandra is the only god.”

  A silent Artha studied Dallandra with hostile, dark eyes. Her hair, a steely gray, hung in two long braids to either side of her wrinkled face. Dallandra kept her own expression carefully arranged in a pleasant, or so she hoped, neutrality.