“I did what?”
But the priest merely gestured ahead impatiently. “There is no time. Soon you will understand. Go now,” he whispered, guiding the invisible mage off the road and continuing along his path. From behind him, he could hear the sounds of galloping horses slowing.
“Pardon, Kano,” panted one man on horseback. “You’ve not seen that mage come by, have you? The one that destroyed your temple?”
Kano smiled up at him with his blank white eyes, and the mounted man visibly shuddered. “Seen?” Kano chuckled softly. “Surely not.”
The rider nodded uncomfortably to the cleric. “Good day to you, then.” Then the search party kicked their horses up into a fast gallop and sped away along the road.
Dith paused in his step. He might have heard the old priest whisper, “Rjeinar’s blessings over you, Blasphemer.” It was probably just the wind.
Fourteen
The river was always lower during the Gathering than it was at the Feast of Didian, especially this high in the mountains, above the springs that fed the lower creeks. Last year’s snows had completely melted off, and the glacier that yearly sought to press its way through the northernmost peaks had likewise given off its yearly melt to stand shrunken and thwarted again. The snows had begun early this year, and the rugged peaks to the northwest stood dusted in a thin sheet of white.
From somewhere near the center of the icy river, Dith burst from beneath the water and sputtered for breath. He waded crossways to the current, working his way back along the boulders on the river bottom that touched the surface in places, and he splashed the mud from his naked body as he moved.
Clenched tightly in his hand, he carried something he had found at the bottom of the river, something sought by men and women of the Art for thousands of years but never found, as far as anyone . Not since Galorin first exiled himself to his Keep. And now, Dith the Merciless held it in his hand.
It was a flattish black stone no larger than a coin, a dull river-tumbled rock of no especial value and clearly flawed, but it was the right one. He was certain.
He lay the stone flat in his palm and slowly turned it in the morning sunlight until a glint caught his eye. Just off-center and to the far side of the stone, a strange silvery vein marred the surface, forking and rejoining toward the right side of the stone just as the river forked to the south and rejoined a few miles before it reached the delta. Just before the fork, tiny spider web strands of silver joined the vein just as the spring creeks joined the river farther south.
His gaze moved left over the stone. He had seen what lay to the south; he was much more interested in knowing what lay above him, to the north. There the vein split several times toward the near side of the stone, toward the west, but the central part of the vein continued almost to the edge of the stone until it split for the last time. Just above that final western branch lay a curious splotch like a drop of molten silver.
This was not how he was supposed to find it. Legend held that the worthy sorcerer would call it to himself from the banks with his power. The Stone would decide whether or not to answer him, whether or not he was worthy. It almost seemed like bad form to go in after it.
Dith grinned where he crouched on the pebbled bank and kissed the stone. Then he flicked it as far as he could over the river, watching it skip twice, three times, before it sank beneath the milky turbulence, safely hidden once more. The keep was between the river’s headwaters and a bit to the west. It seemed the most likely place for it in these mountains; he wondered that no one had ever found it before him. Then again, it was probably high on a cliff wall and surrounded by bare rock faces and steep mountains, as he had seen in his dreams. He could be no more than a tenday’s climb from finding it, from being able to see it at the very least. Once there...
He sighed then and shivered in the cold, and his triumphant grin faded.
Last night’s fire he had started with flint and steel, just as he had every night’s fire since he left Montor half a month ago. It was a necessary skill, he told himself, one he should keep in practice. Besides, he had not tried to start a fire without magic since he was a boy, and he found a certain novelty in it, a certain mindless challenge, Man against Nature or some such. But last night, the wood was wet and nearly frozen with the early mountain snow and ultimately Nature had defeated him.
Oh, he had managed to get the fire started, though it took him the better part of the night, but it starved and died soon after he had fallen asleep; to his disgust, the robes he had washed in the river the day before hung stiff and frozen where he had spread them to dry beside what was now no more than a cold pile of blackened wood. He could dry them himself with a thought, but that was beside the point.
Last night, when the first drops of cold rain started to fall, he had raised his hand in frustration, ready to loose a small spark into the stubborn wet pile of wood. But then he had lowered it again, angry with himself for letting his power become such a habit, such a weakness. Angry that he should be so powerful and yet so powerless. Other men could start fires with flint and steel and, yes, with wet wood as well, and using no magic at all. Other men understood their limits and lived within them, he told himself.
Limits, indeed. He laughed at the heavens and cracked the worst of the ice off his robe before he pulled it on, still damp and cold. His power grew by the day, by the hour; it had no limits but those he chose to impose upon it by his own design. He controlled it completely; likewise, he controlled when he would and would not use it. Now, for example, he chose not to use it; he would not be forced into using his power, not even by his own discomfort. He slipped his soft seamless Bremondine boots on and stood, grateful for their warmth.
He had chosen not to use his power to start his fires, and he had chosen not to dry his robes with it. Just as he had chosen not to call the River Stone with it. He could not allow the River Stone to reject him, after all, so he had fetched it out of the river himself, no mean feat and certainly a show of power in itself. But he would not let his power control him. He could not.
He was not afraid of it, not at all.
He swallowed hard and stared down at his boots.
Not exactly. But something had changed over the last several months, and now, since before Montor, really, he found himself as clumsy with his power as if his hands were mittened in wool. No, it was more as if he had just lost the last twenty years of work, of discipline. And yet everything he had learned was still there, still reachable, perhaps even more finely-tuned than ever before. It was just that none of it applied anymore. He gazed up at the bald crest that rose to the north. The mountain beckoned to him; Galorin’s Keep was almost within sight. And he could not trust himself to start a simple fire.
Even if he could not put a name on what was happening to him, he had known what caused it even before he undertook this journey. It was why he had left Graymonde in the first place. This was not some sort of revenge on Rjeinar’s part. Nor was the burned tavern door the first time he had lost control. No, nor the second, nor the two hundredth, he told himself harshly. Not to mention the temple. Never had he felt so much power surge through him before, and for the first time he had felt a flicker of fear.
Fear, nonsense. He would never fear magic, least of all his own. His power was growing too fast, outstripping his control; it was that simple. Galorin would see his talent and help him to regain his control, teach him how to direct this incredible power. Either that or he would call him a threat and kill him out of hand. If he could. Dith frowned and skipped a stone into the river.
Before Montor, before he left Graymonde, even before the end of the war, he had felt changes in his power, barely noticeable, a thousand little things that others might have written off to luck, to Limigar’s distraction, what have you. He wrote it off to simple good fortune when he thought of it at all, and he chose to ignore it for the most part.
At first, his vision had cleared a bit; not his vision in this world, but his vision of what he would cre
ate, what he would change. The minutiae that controlled what could and could not happen, what was and was not possible. When he would use his power, time seemed to slow for him, and he could carefully examine each thread, each particle of each thread, each infinitesimal degree of force that flowed around him. Then, when he was ready, just the least little tug here or there...
Later, he noticed that he seemed much stronger, less drained and exhausted after each battle. Sharper, quicker. He was better able to direct his protections over the soldiery, better able to aim and even contain his attacks. The magic seemed swifter, more powerful. More deadly.
Then he destroyed the ship in Brannford port. The explosion had been pure luck, he had told himself then; after all, the weather had been unusually dry. A few sparks in the dry wood, and up it went, Kadak’s graetnas and all. Except that he had felt the power surge through his body, and it had not felt like a few sparks. In the heat of the moment, in the heat of all those moments, he had not wanted to look any closer.
No, that was not quite right. He had wanted to look closer; he’d simply never bothered, an odd thing in itself. Since when had he been so deliberately unobservant, so less than curious?
At the time, he had entertained no explanation beyond his own innate talent and practice. He had been too busy helping to defeat Kadak to consider it further. But looking back on it, he had to wonder.
Hadrians always were a bit jumpy, and at the stronghold, they’d been even more nervy than usual. He had always assumed that their state of mind had made the illusion more believable to them.
When the rock in the westernwall of Kadak’s stronghold had rumbled and roiled slightly, then stopped, he’d wondered why such simple illusion was so difficult. Very well. He'd tightened his focus. The great roar and angry scarred visage of Rjeinar that burst forth from the rock had been better than he’d hoped. The spitting rage had been a nice touch.
“How dare you!” the god’s red-eyed image had shrieked, loosing fire and lightning behind the fleeing Hadrians. Dith had had to move off to keep from being hit by the barrage. Once he had seen the last of the traitors run away into the darkness, he dismissed the god’s likeness with no more than a wave of his hand.
How dare you… He had always assumed that that was directed toward the Hadrians, but now he wondered if it hadn’t been directed at him. But why?
After all the hubbub and hoopla of the celebrations, he and Gikka had retired to Graymonde, there to spend their days doing little more than eating and drinking and making love and laughing at the bards’ stories. They had had to tend her miners, but the miners were kept under control by rumor and reputation and by their fear that the blue-eyed child god, Limigar, the bringer of bad luck, might grow bored with their offerings of puzzles and toys at His shrines and amuse Himself at their expense. So Dith had had little to do but show his blue eyes occasionally to keep them under control.
He doubted he so much as warmed a loaf of bread with his power the whole time he stayed at Graymonde. So it was not until very near the beginning of Gathering that he had found the dusty little rucksack again, in the stables where it had fallen behind the workbench.
Look what I brung you, Dith!
Slowly, he walked over the riverbed rock, toward where the ugly orange rucksack lay slumped on its side next to the failed fire. He looked warily at the sack, but the sack itself was not to blame. It, the cause of all this, was inside. His fingers reached out mechanically to pick his rucksack up, fumble the top open and take the thing out.
When Gikka had given it to him, he had turned the odd thing over in his hands just as he did now.
She’d called it a clever bit of stone and nothing special. It was an odd piece of dull black stone about the length of his hand, and it might have been some natural piece of rock she’d found at the roadside except for several abortive cuts and scrapes at the narrower end which somehow seemed to him the top, as if someone had tried to sculpt it and found it too hard. It had similar scratches and marks lining the edge of the fatter bottom. Top, bottom, it was all arbitrary. He could not get it to stand flat on any of its faces when he set it down. It ever seemed ready to wobble its way back to him.
It had all but jumped out at her from a saddlebag as she passed, and thinking Dith would like it, she’d brought it back to camp for him, though once she’d handed it to him, she’d been filled with a certain apprehension about it.
The scratches and marks were too carefully made, too uniform, and certain of them repeated themselves here and there, like some sort of writing. If he let his eyes focus past the stone, past the cuts at the narrower end, they almost suggested something to his eye, something he could not quite see.
That was when it had started. He stared at the rock now as he did each time he took it out, stared at the strange half-letters at the broad end, the carving at the narrow end. Each time he looked at it, the shape of it became clearer, sharper, the suggestion of a form more definite. Yet to Gikka’s eye that could see flaws in gems at ten paces, the stone itself had remained unchanged, which meant that it must be changing him.
He stood impulsively now and drew his hand back to throw the stone into the river, never to see it again, never to feel it pulling at him again. Yes, bury it beneath the river with the River Stone where no one would ever find it! By the gods, what had possessed him to go back for it in the Montor jail, when he might have saved himself several minutes in his escape and been finally free of it? Had they been just a bit smarter, the constables might have caught him down in the dungeon, and for what? An ugly, little, needy bit of rock.
Without it, he told himself, he had kept perfect control of his power, bending the light, creating the illusionary guards. Yes, throw it. Do it. He stopped with his hand back, ready to throw the rock into the river.
But the skin on his scalp crawled. No. No! He had been without it when he put the two guards to sleep, and they had not awakened. His hand squeezed the rock.
He had only Kano’s word that they would never awaken.
“You do not know,” he said aloud, unconvinced even by his own voice. “You do not know...” Slowly, he lowered his hand and let the stone fall. Somehow, it managed to land in the rucksack.
He could walk away. He stood and smoothed his damp robes. The rucksack was empty but for the strange rock; he could leave the whole thing there on the ground beside him. He could turn without looking back and simply walk away. One step, then another.
He squinted north along the river, along his route toward the keep, along the low trees that lined the banks. Then with a deep sigh, he turned and walked away.
Four miles later, making his way down the side of a ravine, he shrugged his shoulder up irritably—the rucksack was slipping down again.
* * *
“You making a new offer, then?” The dark Syonese man sat picking the dried mud from his boot tips in the tavern and flicking it to the floor. “How much?”
Mayor Dalthaz pulled his gaze away from the curls of mud where they fell and smiled broadly, obviously pleased with the generosity of his offer. The man could not help but accept. “Whatever they are offering, we will gladly double.”
“Well,” the other breathed, pulling his chair forward. He squinted over the Hadrian selectmen who sat gathered at the nearby tables. “That’s just the problem, ain’t it? They,” he said heavily, “are withdrawing their offer, just like that.” He settled back and crossed his arms. “Double nothing ain’t but nothing. I need round numbers, and bloody big ones, or I’ll be saying good day.”
“Withdrawing their offer, did you say?” Mayor Dalthaz blinked in confusion. “But that cannot be. He destroyed the temple! Do you mean to say that Rjeinar’s—”
“And a big bloody bounty they were offering, too. More’s the pity.” He hawked and spat into his mug. “But I hunted this one before, during the war, and well I know him.”
“You’ve…failed at hunting him before, then?” asked one of the selectmen with a frown.
Hallin
glared at him. “I hunted this one off and on, as bounty against him rose and fell. But then at war’s end, he’s the hero, and besides, I’m tripping right and left over Rjeinarian priests twixt him and me, so it’s not long before I’m at better things.” When the man looked away, he shrugged and turned his attention back to Dalthaz. “As for the Rjeinarians, just as well they lost interest. Between us? No man could bring him in alive like they wanted, not even me. So I’m thinking,” he shrugged again, “none’s the loss.”
“Well,” chuckled the mayor weakly, “we have no such conditions. Dead or alive, either way.”
“Better dead,” muttered the constable. He scowled up at the hunter. “Two of my men lay all but killed at his hand. Good men, too, and wasting away, curled up like newborns in their beds. I can’t even pension their wives proper, not until they’re in the pyres.” With a bitter shake of his head, he looked away. “All I want is his head.”
The bounty hunter nodded. “Notice of bounty said fifty.” He sat forward. “For one of his ilk, I’ll leave him lie unless you make it five hundred.”
The selectmen stared at him in silent disbelief.
“Five hundred,” repeated the mayor, gesturing them to calm themselves. He smiled shrewdly, cracking his mental knuckles. “What say you to seventy-five?”
“No less than five hundred.” The hunter smiled through crooked teeth and gazed around at their faces. “I’m not playing with you. Either your word is yea or I’m at my own hearth in Durlindale come the tenday, and Dith be damned.”
“But—”
“But what? He’s got a couple of tendays lead on me already, and he knows his way besides.” The bounty hunter jabbed his finger at them. “You’ve no time to dicker. Now, what’s it to be?”
The mayor looked between the selectmen for a moment. “Yes, yes, all right, five hundred.” They gasped in astonishment, but he ignored them. He nodded to the constable, who stood fidgeting near the door. “For his head. Payable in full,” he added hastily, “upon delivery.”
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 23
