Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 03] - Owlknight

by Mercedes Lackey

  Darian did not open his eyes, since he would be exploring the forest for some distance around—perhaps a distance of a league or two—and the night was still young.

  He himself had worked this area as a child; now he had to bring those childhood memories up from the back of his mind, superimpose them onto their current surroundings, and then—then he would invoke Mage-Sight, but he would be looking for two things. First, he would search for objects that did not belong in the forest naturally, such as refined and forged metals. Such things, even in a state of decay, might hold the traces of the humans that had made or owned them. Second, he hoped that his kinship with his parents would draw him to anything that they had once used.

  It was not always easy to keep an objective pursuit as the hours of sifting went by. When he dredged through his memories for physical references to the landscape, he would come across one image after another of his mother’s smile—or of his father trimming away a loose branch—or of him bending a trap-wire carefully while explaining to his young son how the spring worked. Darian would get such memories brought back to him, lit with intensely bright sun, in that way that only fond recollections seem to have.

  It was fortunate for him, he knew, that the visions of Mage-Sight could not be blurred by tears.

  Mage-Sight showed him the world as it was for those who could see the energies of life. On the surface, the living animals and plants were each enveloped in a faint emerald glow, a mist of verdant power, thin but very real. This, rather than the deeper layer where the ley-lines were, was the stratum he wanted to examine.

  His emotions were suppressed through practiced discipline just enough to be able to work safely. He existed in a detached and analytical state for this exercise in receptivity to power—at least, that was the ideal intent. The pace of his search was slowed by periodic pauses, while he collected his thoughts from the effects of one family memory or other. In the intervening times of emotional control, he searched for “holes” in the overlying mist, places where the nonliving intruded through the living at certain relative “depths.”

  He concentrated on each of those places, usually discovering that the “hole” represented a rock, or a place scorched bare by fire or lightning. Meanwhile, Wintersky worked quietly around him as he painstakingly sifted through each area he thought he remembered. With all of his concentration centered on his task, he was not aware of time passing. He was not aware of anything except the next pattern of radiant energy, from the next hand’s breadth of ground. He felt the “glare” of someone approaching, seeming to his magical vision much like someone was walking closer bearing a torch while his eyes were adjusted to night and starlight.

  Wintersky touched his elbow, getting his attention without disturbing his search. Like a sleepwalker, Darian allowed Wintersky to guide him to a place to sit, allotting just enough of his attention to keep from stumbling over his own feet. He continued his search without a moment’s pause.

  He sensed—albeit remotely—the sun setting; he felt it as an overwhelming, nurturing presence slowly sinking away.

  In addition to searching out gaps in the fabric of life-energy, he used a more subtle “sense” in his examination—the Earth-Sense that made him a Healing-Mage. It was more like a sense than a skill, since it was not always consciously directed. As he examined each bit of ground, he let the earth tell him about itself. Had it been injured, had it been contaminated in the past? Was it under some sort of pressure, other than the normal pressures of life and change? Was there anything different about it? The more he listened to the earth, the farther that sense extended, and the easier it was to read the earth ways.

  He expected to find at least one Change-Circle this way. This area had not been checked for mage-storm damage or interference, except in a very cursory fashion, because the Changecreatures that had come out of it had long since been “dealt with,” and whatever had happened here during the Storms had not been grave enough to disrupt the flow of magic to k‘Valdemar. Eventually every finger-length of land would be gone over with the same painful care that he was using now, but such a detailed examination would take decades, even centuries. For now, only specific strategically important areas of the land closest to k’Valdemar had undergone such intense scrutiny.

  He sensed a fire crackling nearby, sensed the cool of evening on his back and the warmth of the fire on his face and chest. Wintersky made the ideal partner in a situation like this one; quiet and unobtrusive, he kept his presence from impinging upon Darian’s concentration, allowing the mage to do what he needed to do.

  It was late, very late, and Darian was just about ready to give up for the night, when a distant hint of “other” distracted him from the area he was in the process of examining. His Earth-Sense, running out ahead of the conscious examination, had found something that didn’t fit. Thirty-some degrees off from his current focus there was another sort of “glare,” more akin to a reversed shadow. And it wasn’t subtle either.

  It was not an impulsive decision to abandon his examination and switch his focus; he was tired, yes, but this was something that needed to be looked at. The “nearer” he drew to the place, the more obvious it became that whatever was here, it didn’t belong. There was nothing “wrong” as such—nothing that a Healing-Mage needed to put right—but this thing that had caught his attention was as obvious as a cabbage in a flowerbed. It was out of place—it had neither been born of this soil, nor had it been brought here long enough ago that some of the sense of it permeated the land around it. It was rawly new, stubbornly unintegrated.

  He drew near enough to “see” its shape and form, clearly. Ah, now, what is this? It was a Change-Circle, all right, but the kind where territory was transported whole. What made it stand out was its sterility—and it was nothing but bare rock, so bare that not even moss grew on it. It had been planted in a scooped-out area of Pelagiris Forest. Tree roots did not penetrate it, though surface vegetation had spilled over onto it from erosion of the surrounding soil. Its surface was not level. In fact, it tilted slightly as a whole, like the side of a shallow hill scooped out by a massive ladle and dropped. The curvature of the stone carried true into the softer ground it had sunken into, and for the first time Darian had evidence that the Change-Circles were not circles at all, but spheres.

  Huh! I wonder what those theory builders back in Haven will make of this?

  He was about to leave the search altogether when something else caught his attention, very like the glint of sun on something small, but shiny and glittering amidst dark tangles of ground and greenery—

  Only in this case, it was a faint calling of like-to-like. Or more accurately, of blood-to-blood. His blood, answering the faint call of blood that he shared—weak, old, but unmistakable—so faint that he had to clear his senses again and refocus. He fed it a wisp of power to reenergize it and make it more easily recognizable for what it was.

  He had just found a possible first trace—the first sign—of his parents’ fate!

  He hardly slept at all that night; only good sense and the need to replenish the energy he’d spent kept him quiet after he’d burst out with his news to his traveling companions.

  Knowing he would not sleep, he simply kept quiet and allowed his body to rest, although his mind refused to. He carefully catalogued all the possible things he could find, and made a simple plan for what he would do for each possibility. It was the equivalent of counting sheep—the only equivalent his emotions would tolerate at this point. At least he had the illusion of accomplishing something to comfort him....

  He dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion at some point, for the next thing he knew, Wintersky was shaking him awake and the stars were fading in the first light of predawn. They packed up the camp together and saddled Jonti and Larak, whose tails were twitching with suppressed energy and excitement. He and Wintersky planned to eat in the saddle, for Wintersky had brought journey-rolls for just that purpose. So they were on their way to the spot he had marked out, rid
ing the dyheli and followed in the trees by their birds before the first hint of sun appeared in the sky.

  He rode in a kind of fever, afire to be there, that very moment; wanting to hope, afraid to do anything of the sort. He couldn’t even think, not really; his mind jumped from one thought to another without any real coherence. Kuari picked up his agitation, and flew back and forth, surging ahead of them, then swooping to the rear to check on their backtrail.

  If it had been remotely possible to Gate there, Darian would have tried. During the entire interminable journey, his stomach churned, the muscles in his shoulders and neck were in knots, and his mouth was as dry as sand.

  Their goal was as clear to outward eyes as it was to his inward senses. It loomed up, enfolded in the white haze of early morning low fog around its base as if it had shrugged off a mantle of clouds. A huge, perfectly spherical piece of gray-white rock, easily the size of his ekele or larger, reared up between the trunks of the trees ahead of them. The moment they spotted it, the dyheli went from their lope into a full-out gallop, leaving Darian and Wintersky to hang onto the handles built into the saddles and stay on as best they could.

  The dyheli skidded to a halt as they reached the artifact, hips slewing a little sideways with the momentum of their run as they dug in their hooves, and Darian leaped from the saddle the moment they came to a halt.

  The surface of the rock was perfectly smooth. Darian tentatively put out his hand to touch it, and the rock beneath his hand might as well have been perfectly polished by a jeweler.

  “It’s amazing. Look at this, Wintersky. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  But he had no thought for how that unusually smooth finish might have happened; what he wanted was on the opposite side of the boulder. He hurried around it to search in the grass at the junction of forest floor and rock. “It’s near here,” Darian murmured. “I felt the sign from near here, on the northwest side of the rock formation. In the soil.”

  Wintersky joined him, the two of them kneeling side by side and carefully parting the grass stems, pulling apart the leaf litter and dead vegetation of so many years, sifting through decayed grasses and earth for some tiny artifact—

  Then, Darian’s fingers tingled as he touched something small and hard under the surface.

  He stopped dead for a moment—then slowly, carefully, probed at the object, fishing it up out of the moist, crumbling soil. His breath caught.

  It was a bone; a tiny bone no larger than a thimble. Now Wintersky took over, pushing Darian aside gently, and hunting carefully and methodically through the loam. Darian went to the dyheli who had followed them to this side of the rock. He pulled his ground-cloth out of his pack and spread it out beside Wintersky, numbly taking what Wintersky dug up, cleaning it meticulously with spit and a handkerchief, and laying it out on the ground-cloth. Of all the things that he had imagined last night, this was not one of them.

  “Lay them out in the order I give them to you,” Wintersky ordered after the third tiny bone emerged from the soil. He excavated the site meticulously, using the tip of his knife as well as his fingers, after cutting a square of turf going back to the rock and pulling it up. Darian obeyed him, and piece by piece, bone by bone, a pattern began to emerge.

  Bones flared at each tiny joint, then nestled into the longer ones of the same general shape; bones gone gray-white from weathering, the surface cracked and pitted. Wintersky worked more slowly now, and there was a pattern to his excavation as he worked out the direction that the bones lay.

  They were toes.

  The heel—the ankle bones—then—

  Right against the rock, flush with it, the joint end of the lower leg bones. But the rest of the bone had been sheared off cleanly, leaving only the rounded ends, with the cuts lying flat against the surface of the rock.

  Slowly, Wintersky picked up the two bone fragments, cleaned them off, and handed them to Darian, cut-end first, so that Darian could see for himself that the ends had not been crushed, as they would have been had the boulder landed after a fall, upon the unfortunate owner of the foot.

  Another few minutes and the remains of a hard boot heel and sole were excavated from rotted tatters of thick canvas.

  —Father—He knew that must be whose foot they had found; he had somehow known it the moment he touched the first bone. He knew it from the lurch in his heart, the dryness of his mouth, the surge in his blood. His father always wore his boots to sleep in, in case there was trouble in the night. He wore canvas-bodied boots coated in the same neutral wax as his leggings, so he would not leave scent marks to warn the game. The waxing had to be restored every few weeks or it would let the canvas rot. This had to be his father’s—

  —but the ends of the bone were shiny, polished, as if they had been cut by a fine saw, then polished by a jeweler.

  “Check with Mage-Sight. Is there any more sign?” Wintersky asked diffidently, laying the two bones down with the rest when Darian did not take them.

  Darian closed his eyes, extended his senses, and—shook his head. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely, surprised at the sound of his own voice.

  Together they looked at the bones, at the incontrovertible evidence that lay before them.

  There was only one possible interpretation.

  “They must have been caught in the Change-Circle,” Darian whispered. He did not for a moment doubt that his mother had been with his father—otherwise she would have made her way back to him. “They were caught in the Circle, and sent—where?”

  Wintersky could only shake his head. “I don’t know, Dar’ian,” he replied. “I just—don’t know.”

  A few hours later, Darian had cause to bless the caution with which Wintersky had worked, for he had managed to preserve the very few representatives of non-native vegetation that had taken root around the boulder. How they had come there, Darian had no idea, but they were not part of the normal flora of the Pelagiris Forest. Perhaps seeds had drifted in with the air that had come with the rock—perhaps they had been caught in a crack at the top of the boulder, for he had discovered by climbing up on top of it that it wasn’t perfectly sheared off. The top, flattened and cracked, looked like normally aged rock surface.

  He carefully and reverently folded away the bones in one of his shirts in the saddlebag. He wasn’t altogether certain how they could be of use—but Firesong would know.

  Surely we can use them to tell me whether Father is dead or alive. That would be some sort of closure; he could weep for them, and know they hadn’t come back to him because they couldn’t. It was a disconcerting feeling, to almost hope they were dead just so he would know at last, one way or the other. It was sobering and distressing at the same time, so he pushed it away from his thoughts through force of will, as he had become accustomed to doing by his training.

  The dyheli were as excited over their own finds as Darian was; with all four of them equally eager to return to k’Valdemar, the young stags alternated their easy, distance-eating lope with bursts of full-out gallop. Darian had only to hang on; they would get him home faster than any other means except by air—though now he was regretting that he had not brought Kel along. Kel couldn’t have carried him home, but he could have taken those precious bones to Firesong.

  He didn’t dare send Kuari ahead with the bones. For one thing, Kuari wasn’t that fast a flyer; for another, they needed his eyes when the sun set.

  Which was going to be very shortly....

  The dyheli could see fairly well in the dark, but not at the breakneck pace they were setting now, and Darian was not willing to waste the power it would take to set mage-lights above and ahead of them; he preferred to use it to augment the dyheli’s strength. They needed Kuari’s night-sight, and the owl was happy to oblige.

  Darkness gradually crept over the forest, and the dyheli linked their minds to Kuari’s. The owl swooped down from among the branches and flew a little ahead of the racing riders, about an arm’s-length higher than their heads. From this posi
tion, he could see anything that would trip the dyheli in any way—and so could they, through his eyes. Wintersky’s bird had already come down and was riding his shoulder, gripping the padding and hunched down with his wings held close to his body.

  Darian guessed that it was just about midnight when the first light of k’Valdemar glimmered through the trees in the distance. The weary dyheli found an untapped reservoir of strength, and broke into a last, tired gallop.

  They stumbled through the Veil, and into the waiting hands of the hertasi. Wintersky had turned his own attention to notifying the hertasi—and thus the Vale—of what they had discovered as soon as they were within range. With Darian occupied in keeping up the stags’ energy, he had no attention to spare for that particular job.

  But thanks to Wintersky, not only were hertasi waiting, but so were Firesong, Silverfox, and Snowfire. The latter took charge of Wintersky, who was just as exhausted as Darian, and ushered him away for congratulations, food, and rest.

  Firesong took one look at Darian’s fever-filled eyes, and simply took charge of the bones and his pupil. “You won’t rest until we know something,” Firesong said wisely, and with unusual gentleness. “Come along; I think I can at least tell you whether your father is alive or dead.”

  He took Darian by the elbow, and guided him in the direction of his ekele and workroom. Darian didn’t resist; he felt as if he was consumed by the need to know. It was a fire in his blood, a blinding light in his mind.

  They went straight to the workroom, where Firesong already had shields cast and the room prepared for what they would do. When all three of them were inside, Firesong motioned for Darian to sit, and closed up the shields, sealing them inside.

  He collapsed onto a stool, and stared hungrily at Firesong, who took the bones and carefully unwrapped them. Darian couldn’t look away from the tiny white fragments; they drew his gaze and held it.