Dalamar The Dark (classics)

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  "Who are you?" he asked, climbing to his feet. One swift glance showed him he'd lost his pack. The little pouch of steel coins, his spare boots, the last leather flask of his autumn wine… all were gone. "Who are you?" he repeated coldly, and though the look he bent on her had chilled the blood of strong folk, this woman never moved but to smile.

  "Best to ask, Dalamar Nightson, where am I? Or, more to the point, where are you?"

  Wind sighed high in the treetops, and it didn't smell of the sea. It dropped low, and it carried the scent of the woman, her leathers, the faint tang of sweat, and the sweetness of the herbs with which she washed her hair. A stream gurgled, water talking to stone on its way by. He stood in an upland forest, so said the boulders strewn about, great chunks of stone of the kind found in the Kharolis Mountains. God-flung stone, the dwarves said, debris from the Cataclysm.

  "Where are you?" asked the woman, tapping the dagger's blade against her knee. The rhythm quickened, suddenly impatient. "Where are you, Dalamar Nightson?"

  "In the Forest of Wayreth," he said, his heart thudding in his chest.

  Out the corner of his eye, he saw something black racing, low on the ground like a hound running. He braced and turned. He saw nothing but forest, trees running upslope, mighty oaks, broad of girth and rough-barked. Sunlight shone through the leaves. So tall were the trees that to stand looking up gave him the feeling of being far down, perhaps beneath the sea where the sky, when seen at all, was but a round disk. As water ripples, so did the light ripple, running with shadow. As water speaks, so did the forest, wind sighing through the oaks.

  "What was that?" he asked, turning to the woman.

  But she was gone.

  Only sun-dappled moss sat on the boulder, thick and golden green. Not even the least scratch marred the softness. All around the stone the moss grew undisturbed. He touched it-springy and cool. He lifted his head and breathed the air. Nothing lingered of the dark-haired woman's scent, not even the faintest trace of leather.

  "Very well," he said. Excitement ran in his belly. His heart beat, and the rhythm of it was the same as the beat of the tapping blade. "I am in Wayreth Forest."

  And the forest does not, he thought even as he looked around, lie just east of Qualimori after all. It didn't lie north of Tarsis or south of Abanasinia. Apparently, the Forest of Wayreth stood wherever it pleased to stand. Be that as it was, he did not stand in sight of his true goal, the Tower of High Sorcery. If the moving forest had caught him, Dalamar had yet to catch the Tower.

  Trees marched, streams gurgled, and in the sky, high white clouds ran before the north faring wind. The path northward through the oaks was a slender one, winding and climbing. All the light in the forest seemed to be behind him. There, glades stretched out, islands of meadows starred by flowers. A stag leaped, sun glinting off the six points of its tall crown of antlers. Dalamar would have taken his oath that he heard a bluebird singing, though no bluebird prefers forests to fields. Out the corner of his eye- Dalamar nodded, understanding-out the corner of his eye, he saw something dark, flying this time, a shadow streaking through the trees, ranging northward.

  Dalamar Nightson turned his back on the glades, on the stag and the bluebird's song, and followed the shadow.

  Dalamar climbed up rock-strewn paths, around washed-out paths, and broad oak trees, and over boulders that surely giants had wedged between the fat oaks. The stout boots he wore, those that had served him well in rough ruins, might as well have been a lord's velvet slippers. His ankles turned on small rocks in the path; he slipped on scree and slid backward, cursing the distance lost. He bled from cuts, and he ached from bruises. Always, he got up again.

  The birds who flitted in this northern wood-crows and rooks mostly-had raucous voices, and they followed him like a mocking mob as he climbed. He looked around, trying to see the leading shadow, that swift streak of darkness. Nothing. He looked straight ahead, attending only a little to his peripheral vision, hoping to catch the glimpse. He did not, but he refused to let himself consider turning back. He had never walked an easy path and had never chosen the straight road, the even ground. It made no sense to do that now. The wind dropped, falling away as though it had no mind to lead him farther. Sweat rolled ceaselessly down his face and itched between his shoulders.

  He went on, muscles aching, heart thudding hard in his chest, and the pulse in his neck hammering. For a time he went to the rhythm of a prayer, one that began as a request for strength from the Dark Son, from Nuitari of the Night. Soon he had no strength or mind to frame his prayer in words. Soon he let only the hammering of his heart act as his plea. Climbing, slipping back, climbing again, he went on until at last he fell and lay still. His heart beat into the earth. His sweat stained the stones as he lay still on the hard road up.

  When at last he stood, he saw a gentling of the path, a leveling of the way. He saw it as a man sees vindication. He put his back into the climb, shouldering forward against the rise, and he walked onto level ground. There he stood, panting and sweating before a large mossy-shouldered boulder upon which sat the dark haired woman, tapping her sapphire-eyed dagger against her knee.

  Smiling, she said, "Where are you, Dalamar Nightson?"

  He didn't answer. He could not. His throat closed up with sudden thirst, and his knees turned weak.

  "Ah," she said, brushing a lock of raven hair from her forehead. She reached behind the boulder and lifted his pack. Rummaging through it as familiarly as though the contents were her own, she pulled out a leather flask and handed it to him. "You look like you need this."

  He drank the wine, glaring at her. He drank, and all the smoky sweetness of the Silvanesti Forest in autumn drifted around him and through him as the first mists of the season drift through the aspenwood. The ache he felt then was not an ache of muscle, not a weariness of bone. What he felt was like the melting of ice, the cracking, the groaning. He closed his eyes, tears stung, and grief held tight to his throat. Tighter to his heart did he hold, and he forbade tears, forbade himself to show any sign of sorrow or weakness before this prankster, this sapphire-eyed woman.

  "Yes," she said. "It's really all about control, Dalamar Nightson."

  "What is?" he asked, wearily opening his eyes.

  "Well, all of it." She pulled up her legs tight to her chest, wrapped her arms round her shins and rested her chin on her knees. "Control of yourself. You do that well, don't you? Control of your life-not a concept with which most elves have intimate understanding, I dare say-and, of course, control of the magic each time you embrace it."

  Ah, magic, the forest and the paths that led to nowhere. "So, it has all been illusion," he said.

  Her blue eyes shone suddenly bright. "The hill and the road up? Not at all. Do your legs feel like you've been walking through an illusion?"

  They did not.

  She sat up, sweeping her arms wide, embracing all the woodland around, the Forest of Wayreth. "All this is real, and all this is magic. The Master of the Tower is in control of this magic, but that doesn't mean you've lost control- which might be part of the problem."

  And then she was gone, vanished, her mossy boulder showing no sign she'd ever been there. Gone, too, was the wine-flask from Dalamar's hand and his pack from the ground.

  South into the glades went the wanderer, through meadows where butterflies danced on daises and ruby humming-birds floated over the sweet soft throats of honeysuckle. South into the sunlight, Dalamar walked beside streams where fish shone like bright silver and dragonflies the color of blue steel darted. When he walked through all the wonders of springtime, he came back to the boulder and the blue-eyed woman. He turned from her before she could speak, and he went away west into an endless purpling twilight. Stars hung low over the trees, and the three moons graced the darkling sky but never moved, not even a hand's width across the night. Owls woke in the oaks and bats flitted. A fox barked, another answered. A shadow darted across his path. He looked, and he again saw her, the trickster, the blue-eye
d woman, smiling at him and sitting on her gray craggy boulder.

  Magic and control. Someone else controlled the forest he wandered in; someone else knew where all the paths led to, and where they all led away from. Magic and control. Dalamar smiled a little.

  She looked around, found his pack, and took out the leather wine-flask. He refused when she offered, but politely.

  "I've had enough of Silvanesti, of any place outside here. For now." He did not smile, though he wanted to, and he chose his next words with care. "I am here, where I need to be."

  "What makes you think that?" asked the dark-haired woman.

  He sketched a bow, not so deep but respectful. "All the reports of my senses seem to lie, and yet my feet lead me always here, to this place. You said it yourself: the magic in this forest isn't mine to control; the way and the road belong to someone else. But if I cannot control the magic, I can control my response to it."

  She looked at him, a long sapphire stare, and then she threw back her head, her laughter sailing up through the trees. In the next breath, the trees and the tall gray oaks receded all around, drawing back from Dalamar and the woman. Moving, they made no sound, and whatever birds or squirrels inhabited bough or nest made not the least protest. Withdrawing, the trees left a wide clear space-not a glade of waving grasses but a close-cropped sward through which a broad road passed. Six knights riding abreast might have passed comfortably on that road, though they would have had to pass round the boulder, the moss-cloaked stone. Above, the sky shone deeply blue, shading toward the end of the day.

  His belly clenching with excitement, his skin tingling as it does when magic is being done, Dalamar looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of the Tower of High Sorcery. He saw nothing, not rising stone, not gated walls… nothing.

  "Remember," said the woman, her voice soft as with distance.

  Quickly, he ruined back to her. In the act of slipping from the stone, the woman vanished. As though mist had risen from the ground, the boulder shimmered behind a gray veil, and the air around it shivered. A man must blink; the eye does it, not the will. In the instant that he did, Dalamar felt all the world change around him, as though the forest folded itself in upon itself, collapsing and then suddenly springing whole and straight again.

  The boulder was gone. No mark of it remained on the firmly packed earth of the road. In its place-and in the place of many trees! — rose great high walls of shining stone. Dalamar's heart leaped, and the blood raced through his veins, singing. He saw not one tower, a solitary monolith such as that at Daltigoth. He saw seven towers.

  Chapter 15

  True time settled over the forest, or what Dalamar reckoned must be true time. He had walked under skies where the sun showed only a time and season the maker of the magic wished it to show. Now shadows shifted on the high stone walls, moving by subtle degrees the patient eye knew how to detect. Light changed on the ground, deepening as the day aged, and this, too, the patient eye understood. The time was nearing toward sunset. As in the world he'd left to come here, the season was summer.

  The patient eye, the patient soul, Dalamar stood outside the gate that was the only breach in the high black wall surrounding seven towers-nor was it much of a breach, for it was locked and shut tight. He wondered how he would go within.

  All around him the Forest of Wayreth rustled. Doves murmured in the eaves of the towers. Wind sighed in the oaks outside the walls. Faintly, the musky scent of ligustrum drifted on the air, though where that hedge-climbing vine grew with its frothing flowers, he could not imagine. Something darted past on the ground. He turned to look, expecting to see that leading shadow, but he saw only a gray rabbit leaping into the brush. He returned to contemplation.

  Seven towers loomed above the three high walls, one each at the point of the triangle made by the meeting of those walls, and four within the compound rising above all. The three at each corner where the walls met were obviously secondary towers. Two tall towers, one on the north side of the compound, one on the south, were separated by two smaller ones, fore and behind. A gate breached the wall, but it seemed to have no mechanisms for opening it, at least not on this side.

  Dalamar went boldly to the wall, and the great age of the stone made itself known to him, the knowledge seeping into his bones. This was not common stone. Poets named stone "the bones of the earth," but Dalamar knew, standing there, that the stuff the wall was made of was truly that- part of the fabric, the essence of Krynn itself. Upon the walls he found many inscriptions. He went close to see them. Some he could read-magical inscriptions to make the wall strong, warnings to intruders, spells to keep out the prying eyes of any diviner using methods of Seeing-others he could not, though he had mastered three ancient scripts and knew somewhat of four more.

  He touched the gate, and, as his fingertips brushed the wood and steel, the air around him changed again, as it had when the towers revealed themselves. This time he did not blink but watched to see what would happen.

  The world did not fold, the air did not shimmer, nothing happened at all.

  And then he found himself at once on the other side of the wall within the compound. He stood in a courtyard paved with gleaming gray stone, and before him rose the four towers.

  "Welcome," said a voice, a woman's, low and laughing.

  Dalamar turned swiftly and found himself looking into the eyes of a human woman, a mage in white robes whose hair lay in two thick black braids upon her shoulders. He knew her, but not by her robes. Here was his guide in the forest, betrayed by her sapphire eyes.

  "Which," she said, "is the Tower of High Sorcery? You're wondering, aren't you?"

  Dalamar said he wasn't wondering that at all. He said he'd reckoned that already. "They are all the Tower. It is as with runes-the name of a rune stands for more than the shape of it. It seems the name 'Tower of High Sorcery' stands for more than the shape of one structure."

  "Impressive," she said, but her expression, faintly amused, said something else. Precocious would have been the polite word. Cocky was the word she was thinking. "Come with me."

  Dalamar followed her closely, not willing to let her lose him in here as she had done in the forest. With each step he took it seemed that the compound became more and more crowded, filling up with mages of all Orders. Some went in groups, dwarves and humans and elves, all talking. Most of the elves he saw were white robed, and none who passed him seemed to care that he wore the dark robe of exile. Other mages walked singly, head down and focused on some inner conversation. One, a dwarf whose robes were as dark as Dalamar's own, looked up when he passed. Dalamar felt his glance like two burning points of fire, and yet he saw no eyes at all within the shadow of the dwarf's hood.

  "Oh, him," said the woman with the sapphire eyes, "don't mind him."

  She said it, but Dalamar heard a kind of lean chuckle in her voice, as though she meant exactly the opposite. Be careful of him? Pay attention to him? That he could not determine.

  The sound of the mages' voices was the hum of a hive, the colors of their robes like a swirl of pennons. What seemed most remarkable to him was that White Robes and Red, even Black, seemed to have no trouble being in each other's company. In Tarsis and most of the world without, White Robes stayed together, mixing rarely with Red and never with those of his own Order.

  "It isn't like that here," she said. "Here, we leave all the baggage on the front stoop, as it were. Here, we don't care which of the three magical children one or the other of us honors. A White robed elf will speak to you as graciously as though you wore snowy samite. Outside, another matter. In here, peace. You come in here, you come to study, to reflect, to breathe the air with mages and speak the arcane language people don't understand who do not hear magic singing in their blood. Or," she said as she stopped before the Foretower, "or you come here to Test." She cocked her head. "That's a flung you'll soon know about, isn't it, Dalamar Argent? The rigors of the Tests?"

  In the warm air of summer, a chill touched him, not becau
se she knew he'd come here seeking to take the Tests of High Sorcery. It was a fair guess and an accurate one. It was the use of his old name that chilled him, sending him suddenly, painfully to the last day he'd seen Silvanesti. Not even the smoky autumn wine could do that.

  "I am," he said, "not Dalamar Argent. If you send to Silvanost and ask them there, you will learn that Dalamar Argent does not exist. And they should know. They keep meticulous records."

  She shook her head as if to say, "But of course Dalamar Argent exists." Aloud, though, she said, "Forgive my mistake. Let us introduce ourselves, then-and properly. I am Regene of Schallsea, and sometimes I'm not what you think I am. You are…?"

  "I am Dalamar Nightson," he said, "and, yes, I have come here to take the Tests."

  "Deadly things, those Tests," she said, as one would say, "Pesky things, those bees." She led him across the compound and past the knots of mages talking. "There is much you will want to see of our Tower of High Sorcery, but little you will have access to just now. You are a visitor, a guest. We will see if that changes after your Tests. Come inside, if you are well and truly ready."

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what she knew about testing, but he did not. She turned to see if he was following, and he caught a glimpse of her sapphire eyes. Then, in that moment at the end of the long summer day, they reminded him not of the young woman laughing on the boulder, but of the dragon, cold and fierce, carved in the ivory handle of the knife she'd been tapping on her knee. "I am dangerous," said those eyes, "and don't mistake me." He gestured as a man does to usher a lady forth, and he followed her into the foretower.