Only after years of being around the knights and around Gikka, one of the least trusted people on all of Syon, had he learned that some people could be trusted. Maybe he could learn to trust a horse, as well.
As silly as it seemed, and perhaps born of his envy of the knights’ relationships with their horses, the thought occurred to him that it would probably be easier for him to trust this half tonne of careening flesh with his life if he treated it more as a companion than as a convenience he’d stolen.
“It seems you’ve become my horse, if you’ll have me,” shouted Dith over the clatter of the horse’s hooves, as if the horse would understand him better if he spoke aloud, “so…what am I to call you?” He fancied he felt surprise followed by a mental shrug from the animal as it moved faster and faster over the rocks and fallen branches. It had always simply been horse/conveyance/beast-of-burden, never a being with a proper name, and one day, as it had been told angrily on more than one occasion, it would be food for dogs.
Stale feed in a bin, a whip across his flank, a tank of dirty water to drink…from the images and feelings Dith gathered from the horse, Hallin had treated this creature very harshly and with little more than contempt, as if horses that would carry a mage could be found at every crossroads. Amazing. Hallin had clearly had no idea of the treasure he had in this animal. Here was a horse who could one day be the equal of Zinion or even Alandro with the proper care and training. His own horse. His––
“Glasada,” Dith said suddenly, his voice surging with each galloping step. He remembered the last time he had seen a glasada danced, almost exactly a year ago during the last Feast of Bilkar. It was beautiful, fast and complex, evocative of the steps of one walking gingerly across an ice floe and testing each step. Dith was no dancer and could not hope to keep up with the dance, but Gikka––his beautiful Gikka––danced it expertly, putting even the barefoot Bilkarian monks to shame. The name was perfect. “What do you think?”
As if to show how well the name suited him, the horse moved confidently down the steep descents and over the snow covered deadfall without a misstep.
“Very well, Glasada it is.”
Eventually, Dith stopped panicking at every turn and let himself trust this new companion––trust Glasada––to find his way, needing only to tell him their destination was Pyran. Oh, not merely the name of the city since he could not expect the horse to know where Pyran was, but the vague direction and route they would take. What would have taken him the better part of a month afoot should take them no more than a tenday together, if that.
“Brilliant, boy. Absolutely brilliant. A horse. I’d never have imagined…”
He could not ignore it any longer. The voice in his mind was louder now, clearer, and most definitely not his own––a separate presence inside his mind. Surely this could not be the horse speaking to him…
“Much better than how I should have gone about it myself.”
Dith shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears and felt the drip of blood welling in his nose, just as he had in the depths of the Keep.
“It’s all well and good to go porting here and porting there, but those in Pyran are a little touchy about such flagrant displays since I…well, since the landbridge fell. No sense of humor, Hadrians, none. So bravo, my boy, bravo.”
The landbridge? So his suspicion was true, then. The voice…
Less than a day had passed since he had left Galorin’s Keep, less than a day since the great obsidian chamber had closed itself behind him and sunken back into the depths of the mountain, but already the whole experience was taking on a dreamlike and distant quality, as if it had happened to someone else or perhaps was all nothing but his own fancy.
He replayed the memory in his mind, refreshing it, reinforcing it. It was real. He knew it was. He would not forget.
He’d stepped down the obsidian stairs to find exactly what he’d expected, shelves full of sheaves and scrolls which contained millennia of logs of experimentation, historical accounts, and dissertations concerning certain aspects of the Art, all written in different languages, different hands… He’d read a few of the most recent ones and fought down a sense of disappointment. Certainty trees with their thready branches into possibility and near-possibility, strands of power, means of concealing those threads even from other mages…it was all accurate enough, certainly, but very little of what he’d skimmed told him anything he hadn’t already learned on his own. He had begun to lose hope of finding the one thing he’d hoped to find: the secret to controlling his strange power, and, of course, what this stupid needy rock in his rucksack had to do with it all.
In one corner, tucked away in an unobtrusive crate under a table and looking more like a scrap of rubbish than anything else, he found a small crumpled bit of parchment. It had not a word written upon it, and he nearly ignored it. But when he lifted it from the crate into the red glow of the mountain’s heart emanating from the walls and floor around him, he saw a vision mark very like the one he’d created for Gikka, only far more intricate and far more intense. His heart raced. He doubted it would allow him to read it since vision marks are usually keyed to one person, but he could not resist trying. As dangerous as reading a vision mark meant for another might be, especially one of this intensity, he knew he had to try.
By the time he’d finished, his head was in agony, and his nose was running with blood. It seemed the vision mark had been meant for him, strangely enough, but in spite of that, the intensity was so great, so overwhelming, that even his own strength could not completely protect him from its power. He’d never experienced anything like it in all his life, and in spite of his pain, he was elated.
He watched the vision mark fade into nothingness. This was the real treasure of Galorin’s Keep, and for all that he had succeeded in finding the keep itself and even in finding this chamber, he’d come terribly close to failure, to walking right past the unassuming crate without a second glance. He might never have found this legacy but for a bit of luck.
“Luck, nothing, it was your damned curiosity. I was counting on it.”
If someone, even another mage, had asked him what he’d found in the vision mark, he could not have said entirely. A life, perhaps, but that was not quite correct. The vision mark did not contain every moment of a man’s life from the first time his nurse set him at her teat to his last breath, nor did it record every sordid assignation or other human foible, but instead, like a deeply detailed memoir, it held every nuance of brilliance, every observation on the nature of the Art, every subtlety, experience, anecdote…literally every moment of one man’s magic.
In this case, of course, that one man was Galorin.
What Dith hadn’t counted on was that the unique combination of his unusual strength and Galorin’s had caused him not only to absorb his knowledge and his power but what seemed his very essence as stored in the vision mark. Not that he had actually absorbed the ancient mage’s spirit or soul into his mind, not exactly. At least he hoped such was not the case. Surely even for someone of his power, bearing the soul of an immensely powerful mage would be too much and might push him to madness. He dabbed worriedly at the drop of blood at his nostril.
“Did you absorb my spirit? An interesting question. Most likely the ‘me’ that speaks with you now is but a copy, and a damned good one if I do say so myself. The real Galorin is no doubt off chasing through the stars on a cloak of night with one god or another. Yes, that’s a much more comforting thought, certainly. At least to me.”
Dith wiped the blood away from his upper lip and rode on, trying to ignore the babbling from the voice in his mind. Had he known he would be so cursed––
“Cursed, oh no, no, you’re not cursed, boy. No, cursed are those poor sods who laid waste to my keep and found nothing. I wonder that their masters even let them live.”
Masters, Dith mused. Mages of sufficient power to destroy Galorin, even in an army—an army!—submitting to masters? What manner of masters might tho
se be, and what were they seeking?
“Well, I should think it obvious that they were looking for me. Not just me, methinks. Then again, I can’t be certain they knew…”
Knew? Knew what?
“Oh, stop your prying. You will know what I know when you need to know and not a moment before. I’ll not have you distracted, not now. Pyran is our first goal and Byrandia beyond that. Trust that Syon will take care of itself. All else, yes, even your lovely dancing Bremondine, is a distraction.”
Dith frowned slightly. That the vision mark left an impression of Galorin in his mind was strange and invasive enough, but for that impression to invade his private thoughts, especially his thoughts of Gikka, was a problem.
“I could tell you to stop thinking about her, but I learned long ago never to tell someone not to think of a sewer rat unless you want him to think of exactly that. So if I told you to stop thinking about her lovely body… Hah! I touched a nerve. Fear me not, boy. Your private thoughts are your own, and I will keep myself out of them even if you do not. We must work together, and I will do nothing to jeopardize that.”
Three
The Abbey of Bilkar the Furred, Syon
Marketday’s Eve
The smooth polished doors swept closed without a sound behind the two cerulean blue mantled knights, pushed precisely into place by several barefoot postulants. In the stillness that settled over the vestibule of the abbey, Lady Renda, Knight of Brannagh, found herself questioning yet again the wisdom of her decision to come to the abbey.
Cardinal Valmerous, late of the temple of Vilkadnazor the Unshod, was well and truly dead. He, his cadre of priests…all dead. Of this she had no doubt. She’d stayed in the place she had come to think of as Pegrine’s Glade, spending a few minutes she was not sure were hers to spend to see his body reduced completely to ash and to kick those ashes into the wind and scatter them for eternity. She’d buried his fire-hardened white teeth separately in the forest surrounding the glade––a superstitious rite, to be sure, but she was taking no chances. At last she’d been satisfied. The evil Hadrian cleric was obliterated and could never return. At the same time, she had no reason to believe that his mysterious god could be defeated so easily.
Easily, indeed. She recoiled at the word, and the measure of her loss threatened to overwhelm her.
I only wish…it could be over for you, too.
Her heart ached for her niece, Pegrine, a loss as fresh as it had been just a season ago. She’d watched helplessly as her family castle was blasted to pieces before an army of knights and mages allied with Maddock and his angry mob, and she’d had to ride away. Her mother, Nara, everyone who had been counting on them to defeat the cardinal and return to lift the siege… They were all gone. There was nothing easy about it.
No. The seasoned strategist in her heart clung cruelly to the word, clung to the truth of it, used it to drive off her naked grief with rage and focus her mind. Objectively, their victory had been too easy. Bishop Cilder had bungled the sacrifice meant to free Xorden and had created Pegrine undead, but in the process, he’d rendered Xorden’s own altar her sacred place of death. Between that and Valmerous’s failure to destroy her in either her place of life or her place of repose, Xorden must have known He could not possibly have prevailed in the glade, not against the knights, and certainly not against B’radik once she was freed. Perhaps even Valmerous had known, but judging by the look on his face when he saw Pegrine transformed and B’radik freed, she thought not.
Still, while His cardinal may have been defeated by one failed ritual in a glade, she doubted the god Himself would be, certainly not with any permanence. This Xorden, this strange Dhanani god, had waited patiently in exile since the end of the Gods’ Rebellion, somehow, somewhere, gathering tiny sips of power where He could until He could bind B’radik, Vilkadnazor and, she feared, many of the other gods besides. His few priests had been strong enough to conceal their natures from her and her father, even under scrutiny, which was no mean feat, although in retrospect, she could not recall having seen them do much else. They certainly hadn’t saved the lives of any of her knights in hospice, she recalled bitterly, not even as part of their ruse. So perhaps they were not as powerful as she’d thought.
In retrospect, of course, it was so obvious. The battle in the glade was no more than a diversion––a diversion which had brought five gods to bear and destroyed the last of the fighting force which had vanquished the demon Kadak but two years before. Still… She swallowed hard. It was only a diversion, just like the plague which had left the land bare of hands to farm it and knights to defend it.
It had been too easy.
The sickness is only a very small part of what you fight; it’s meant to keep you from the real battle.
Strategically, she had no choice but to consider Xorden’s departure a retreat and nothing more, which meant two things. The first was that the danger to herself, her father, and what few of their allies remained grew by the hour, and those allies were now scattered to the winds. They were at war again, as surely as they had been when they fought Kadak, and now their enemy knew the measure of their weakness. He would wait only as long to bring the battle to them as it would take to regain His strength and find them. Better He should confront them all together than pick them off one by one. Second, she was mindful that many of the other gods were likely still weakened or bound. How many or which ones, she had no way of knowing, and the thought sickened her. She could not count on their help.
B’radik was free, but without Her priests, She would be of little use. Renda had to hope that Bilkar, the god to whom this abbey was consecrated, was free as well. If somehow the incorruptible Bilkarian monks had been corrupted after all and the fearsome Bremondine god of winter was bound, Renda may well have marched her father and herself, two of B’radik’s only remaining protectors, right into their enemy’s hands.
The only question was whether she would know before it was too late. She hoped so. She could not afford to be wrong.
Precision, efficiency, simplicity… Even without His being bound, the hallmarks of this particular god could work for or against the knights. The intolerance for weakness and waste was clear enough, given their god’s harsh demeanor and demand for self-discipline and strength above all, but one could never know what they would perceive thus. Bilkarian priests might stop to pet a three legged dog but just as calmly snap the neck of a slow witted child. Misunderstandings had led to deaths in the past, leading the Bilkarians to restrict themselves to their abbey for most of the year, which of course only served to feed the mystery surrounding their order.
Gikka had shared many stories from her youth of all the time spent living in the temples of various gods, and while she still held a certain fondness for the followers of Bilkar, even she stepped carefully around them.
In the patchy snow surrounding the abbey, Renda had seen a few places where the monks had taken what must have been a small deer, where even the bloodstained snow beneath the fallen animal had been scraped up and carried inside, not a bit to be wasted. Other than the tracks of animals in the snow, she saw nothing, certainly nothing that led her to think anything was amiss. No stray light, no curls of smoke or sloppily placed footprints betrayed any obvious corruption.
Then again, Cilder had been B’radik’s bishop long before he was corrupted by Xorden, and all the other cardinals and priests who had fallen had likewise started as loyal followers of their gods and knew their orders’ ways. Was it any wonder, then, that they were able to fool her and everyone else? No, she would need to set her assumptions and, more importantly, her hopes aside to concentrate her energies on examining the priests themselves and the abbot.
She could second guess herself again and again, but lacking any other information, she had approached the abbey with the loosely held assumption that the Bilkarians had not yet succumbed, an assumption so welcome, so seductive, that she continued to be wary. Her uncle, Brada, had told her many times that the lies we want to be
lieve are ever the most difficult to perceive. She needed her perception to be clear.
The austerity of the abbey was just as Gikka had described it to her during the war. The large and unremarkable square keep was all that remained of an ancient Bremondine castle that had fallen sometime during the first war between the Bremondines and the Hadrians when Cardon of Brannagh’s ruthlessness put an end to both sides’ ability to fight, and brought the war to an end, at least for a while. The gutted castle and its grounds were given to the Bilkarians as their sanctuary, and since that day, no sheriff nor knight of Brannagh had set foot there, not even during the Five Hundred Years War. Still, these monks owed their continued existence to the House of Brannagh following the Bremo-Hadrian Wars, and she hoped they would remember. She hoped it would be enough.
The ruins of the outer castle walls had long since crumbled and vanished into the forest growth, but the keep itself was so well maintained, it looked as if it might have been built within the last year. Inside, the mortar between the stone blocks was almost invisible and perfectly smoothed beneath the plaster. The floors were spotless, dry of even the sloppy wet boot prints she and her father had just tracked in. The novices had dried them before padding off down the corridor to fetch the abbot. She’d seen no evil about them as they worked, and novices could not deceive as easily as bishops or cardinals. She took this as another good sign and bucked up her courage.
Daerwin of Brannagh leaned heavily on his daughter, cradling his burned arm. The last of the salve Chul had given him had done what little it could against the ongoing burn and worn off long since. In spite of the cold, Daerwin’s brow was speckled with sweat, not from fever but from pain which had all but stolen his wits from him. “Renda,” he gasped, “Are you sure this is wise? Bilkarians…and I am so…weak…”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 5
