The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Menerchel picked him up and set him on Hindulo’s back, then mounted up behind him. Cilarnen slumped forward against the unicorn’s neck before he could stop himself. He struggled to sit upright; the warmth Hindulo radiated was enough to thaw him to the point his teeth began to chatter violently.

  His shivering passed after a few minutes, and Cilarnen began to talk, his voice stronger now, and clear. His speech was as blunt as a sword-cut, but Menerchel was not offended. It would be foolish to hold Mages—especially young human Mages—to the same standards of conduct as his own people. Different peoples had different customs, after all. And Mages were different from everyone.

  “There is—there was—a village called Nerendale in the Delfier Valley, where the Mountainfolk come—came—to trade with the City. The—They—came there, and killed them all. And the men and the horses—They took the Mages away with Them—Juvelira and Thekinalo—I knew them—I worked with them at home… .” The boy’s voice faltered, catching on a sob.

  “How could you see this?” Hindulo demanded, not pausing in his easy trot across the surface of the snow. “The Wildmages have not been able to see what goes on in the City.”

  “I am no Wildmage. The High Magick does what I tell it to do,” Cilarnen said, his voice going hard. But Menerchel could feel his body shaking beneath the heavy cloak with something that was more than cold.

  “No further,” Hindalo said regretfully, stopping.

  The edge of the main camp lay just ahead. In the darkness, the pavilions that had their lanterns lit glowed as if they themselves were enormous colored lanterns, and the sound of laughter and even music could be heard across the distance. Near the camp the deep loose snow had been cleared from the ground so that the Centaurs and the various mounted units could drill; what remained was hard-packed and easy to walk upon.

  “Menerchel will wish to know if he must carry you,” the unicorn added for Cilarnen’s benefit, tossing his head.

  “I can walk!” Cilarnen said instantly. “But… I will be grateful if you will come with me, Menerchel. And I thank you—both—for being there tonight.”

  “It is a small matter,” Menerchel said. “Do not think of it.”

  He swung down from Hindulo’s back, and helped Cilarnen to dismount. The boy was a little unsteady on his feet, but in much better shape than he had been when they had first found him.

  “I will wait for you at the edge of camp,” Hindulo said, turning and springing away. His body was a golden gleam against the snow as he sprang through the darkness.

  Cilarnen turned to watch Hindulo go.

  “They are the most beautiful things in all the world,” he said, as solemnly and intensely as if he were passing judgment.

  “In that matter, you and he are in full agreement,” Menerchel said with a smile. “And I as well, for that matter. Come. It is not far.”

  Hasty and strange the young human Mage certainly was, but anything that loved unicorns as Cilarnen High Mage so obviously did was certainly of the Light.

  A High Mage was something Menerchel only knew of from the oldest of Master Belesharon’s Teaching Stories. He had never expected to meet one—in fact, if anyone had asked him five years ago, he would have solemnly assured them that it was far more likely that he would meet a Knight-Mage first—even though as far as anyone knew at that time, there were no Knight-Mages at all, and there was an entire city of High Mages at the other side of the Wild Lands.

  But to meet a High Mage—if he had been foolish enough to attempt it—Menerchel would have had to leave the Elven Lands (and he had been entirely happy in Thultafoniseen, working in his family’s tea business, when he and Hindulo were not engaged in other duties), cross the Wild Lands, and successfully enter Armethalieh, something his friend Hyandur had not been able to do—doing much to prove, in Menerchel’s mind, that the thing could not be done save by overwhelming force.

  And since Menerchel had thought in those days that he would be unlikely to leave Thultafoniseen for long, and never leave the Elven Lands at all, and he knew that he was certainly incapable of overwhelming Armethalieh by himself, and the High Mages never left their city, it seemed far more likely that, of the two possibilities, he would see a Knight-Mage first, since a Knight-Mage was a kind of Wildmage when all was said and done, and they were not in the least uncommon in the Elven Lands.

  And in fact he had seen a Knight-Mage first, but to add rarity to improbability, a High Mage had left the City of Mages and traveled across the Wild Lands and into the Elven Lands, so now Menerchel had seen a High Mage as well.

  I must stop wishing to see things—unless it is our victory, and all of Them vanished. I am certain Hindulo would agree. And yet… it seems very odd to me that such brief and hasty people as the High Mages should have such power as Kellen and Cilarnen have both spoken of. Perhaps they have such powers precisely because there are creatures such as Them in the world. In which case, if all of Them were destroyed, would the High Mages lose their powers as well?

  It was a riddle that could not be solved tonight.

  Healer’s Row was near the middle of the camp, where the most vulnerable of the camp’s inhabitants—the sick, the wounded, and the Healers, who rarely wore armor, at least while treating patients—could be sheltered in the event the camp was directly attacked. Because it was early in the evening, Menerchel looked for Idalia first in the sick-tents, and not at her own pavilion.

  CILARNEN sat on the long bench in the outer room with Menerchel while another Elf—Yatimumil, he thought his name was—went off to get Idalia. The setting bore an odd resemblance to the day he’d met Kellen, and Kellen had dragged him off to the Healer’s tent.

  His head had hurt then, too. Thank the Light it wasn’t summer; he felt as if the cold was the only thing keeping the pain at bay. He lowered his head into his hands and squeezed his temples. It didn’t help.

  There were Healing Spells in the High Magick, of course, but nowhere in all the Art Magickal had a time been foreseen when a Mage might have to heal himself. Wildmages might wander the earth like solitary lunatics, so Wirance had told him, never seeing another of their own kind from the moment they embraced their magical destiny till the day of their death, but High Mage worked in Circles, in Colleges, in Councils… Cilarnen could be a solitary High Mage much easier than he could imagine one.

  “I See you, Menerchel.”

  When he heard Idalia’s voice, Cilarnen raised his head.

  Menerchel bowed. “I See you, Idalia. The blessings of Leaf and Star be upon you this night. I bring you Cilarnen High Mage, whom Hindulo found asleep in a snowbank, though not for long enough to take much hurt from it, I think. He brings grave news of a place called Nerendale, and he would have you know of it. I regret such rudeness and brevity, but the Unicorn Scouts ride picket tonight, and I am needed elsewhere.”

  “Then you must go at once, Menerchel, and give my thanks to Hindulo. The blessings of Leaf and Star go with you also.”

  She waited until Menerchel had left, and then turned to Cilarnen.

  “Of all the stupid, half-witted, inconsiderate—” she began furiously.

  Cilarnen laughed, though it turned into a groan of pain halfway through. “ ‘Stupid’ and ‘half-witted’ I will grant you, Lady—Idalia—though by the Light, I could not bear to be alone tonight—but how ‘inconsiderate’?”

  Idalia stared at him for a moment, then took a deep breath. “To begin, once we noticed you missing, we’d have to go looking for you. And then, once we found you dead, some of us would be sorry. And even those who did not mourn your loss would worry that your death meant that some enemy had managed to get close to the camp to kill you.”

  “I see,” Cilarnen said distantly. “I apologize for troubling you, Wildmage. Nevertheless, my news is urgent. Perhaps you will hear it and give your opinion as to whether Redhelwar should hear this at once.”

  IDALIA sighed inwardly. She’d managed to forget what Kellen had been like at the very first—in feveris
h high spirits one moment and brooding in corners the next, wearing his feelings on the outside of his skin and as volatile as only a teenaged boy could be.

  Though he did his best, Cilarnen was a thousand times worse, adding to Kellen’s mix the sensibilities of a pampered aristocrat and the arrogance of a High Mage. That they all hadn’t been tempted to murder him a thousand times over was a tribute to the fact that somehow Armethalieh hadn’t managed to ruin him.

  But tonight he was tired, and he knew he’d pulled a stupid stunt trying to walk down from the ice-pavilion in the dark. It was a long walk even in the daylight. Too long, unless the air was absolutely still and the sun was out.

  And he looked ill. Feverish.

  Let the plague not come here. Gods of the Wild Magic, is that too much to ask? So many people gathered in one place, it would go through the camp like fire through a standing grain field at harvest.

  “Cilarnen?” she asked quietly. “Are you ill? Is that why you came?”

  “No.” He sounded very positive, but she had never seen him look less well in all the time she had known him. “My head hurts again, but that is not why I came. They have killed everyone in Nerendale, and the Militia, too. Anigrel sent them to Nerendale—I think he sent them so that they would be there to be killed. Perhaps it was a sort of sacrifice. Or perhaps he does it willingly. They have two High Mages now as well—they were not friends of mine, but they were men I knew. Middle Houses, of course. Not well-connected. Or else they would not have been sent, you see.” His tone was reasonable, but his pupils were widely dilated, and his words made no sense at all.

  “Cilarnen,” Idalia said carefully, “you can’t know what’s going on in Nerendale. That’s inside the Bounds, and none of us can scry inside the Bounds.”

  “The difference between your magic and mine,” Cilarnen said dismissively, “is that mine does what I tell it to, and yours does what it thinks you should do. Today I saw Nerendale. I wish I hadn’t,” he added, as if to himself.

  “You made your magic work,” Idalia said, realizing what Cilarnen was not saying.

  Cilarnen nodded, and then winced. “I can cast any of the spells of a High Mage. I haven’t practiced most of them, and I don’t understand them, and I still don’t have a lot of the equipment and materials I need, and some of the spells just require more than one person, but as long as I’m within the Elven Lands, I have the power.” He took a deep breath, and seemed to consider the matter carefully. “I think I’d rather have a dragon.”

  Idalia shook her head, exasperated with herself. Shock. He was in shock. She hadn’t seen the symptoms because she hadn’t been looking for them and they were masked by the magic, but they were there, now that she was looking for them.

  Curse every High Mage back to the founding of Armethalieh for the way they raised their sons! Cilarnen was no Elven Knight, but it looked like the Mage College could show the House of Sword and Shield a thing or two about stoic endurance.

  And possibly pure stupidity.

  “First I’ll get you the cordial for your headache. Then I’ll get you a mug of hot sweet cider and a little soup. Then you can tell me about Nerendale from the very beginning. If you can look into Armethalieh, there are some things I’d like to look at.”

  SHE sent a runner to the Centaur camp for Kardus, then she had Yatimumil get Cilarnen into dry clothes and wrapped in blankets and settled between a pair of warming braziers. Once she’d dosed him with the cordial and gotten some food and drink into him, his color improved, and he seemed to be tracking better.

  By that time, Kardus had arrived.

  “You have seen Them again,” the Centaur Wildmage said without preamble.

  Cilarnen nodded, looking very much as if he wanted to cry. He nodded. “Like Stonehearth. Worse. Anigrel… he knew They’d be there. I know he did. He sent the Militia right to them. And two High Mages. They took them away alive. They killed all the others.”

  “Cilarnen,” Idalia said gently, “will you be able to tell this twice?”

  While nothing that had happened several hours ago in Nerendale could be urgent enough to justify rousing Redelwar for in the middle of the night, he would certainly need to be told, and it would be best if he could be told by the one who had actually witnessed the events.

  Cilarnen nodded shortly. He seemed to draw on his resources, pulling the facts together in the proper order. Then he began.

  “As you’ve guessed by now, the spell to gain a power source worked. The Elven Elementals sent help. As soon as I had a source of power for my spells, the first thing I did was to cast the Glyph of Far-Seeing upon the Council Chamber of Armethalieh.”

  Cilarnen said this as if it were the most logical—and reasonable—thing in the world. Idalia supposed a High Mage might think it was, and silently cursed herself for not sending someone to check on Cilarnen every single day—but the army’s resources were still stretched far too thin since the Battle for the Heart Forest and the Spell of Kindolhinadetil’s Mirror. He’d been sure he’d be fine, and was so insistent about being left alone—to study, she’d thought—that she’d simply let the matter drop. The ice-pavilion had been within range of the farthest-out of the patrols, after all, so it wasn’t as if nobody at all had been keeping an eye on him.

  Just not, apparently, a close enough one. She’d been going to ride up there tomorrow, since it would have been four days without word.

  She sighed. She should have gone sooner. She knew how single-minded Cilarnen had become once he’d gotten the idea that getting his magic back was possible. It probably hadn’t even occurred to him that he should let someone know what he’d done and what he was about to do.

  And he’d made fun of the Wildmages for being solitary!

  “There are only seven on the High Council now,” Cilarnen went on. “Lord Anigrel—Lord Anigrel, oh, that is a mockery! House Anigrel was never particularly high among the Mage Houses; when Ceonece Anigrel married Torbet Dusaynt there was a great scandal, as he was a commoner, like poor Tiedor, but he had a strong Gift, and House Anigrel fostered him… . Anyway, Lord Anigrel proposed sending the Militia to evacuate Nerendale. The villagers had petitioned for relief. According to the Council, the Wildmages were raiding in the Valley and killing villagers, and they were afraid to stay.”

  “Wildmages!” Kardus said in disbelief. “But that’s—”

  “Part of Anigrel’s plan,” Idalia said bitterly. “So the Council—which apparently means Anigrel these days—sent a detachment of the Militia to move them.”

  “Yes,” Cilarnen said. He pulled his blankets more tightly around himself, staring down at his empty cider mug. “I knew when they would arrive, and I knew there would be Mages with the Militia, so I sent out my next Far-Seeing Spell two days later to find any Mages outside the walls of Armethalieh, since I didn’t know where Nerendale was, or what it looked like. And I found them. Forty soldiers and two Journeymen, Masters Juvalira and Thekinalo. The villagers didn’t know they were coming, and they’d made no preparations to leave. They stood around and argued about what they needed to take. Juvalira and Thekinalo could have made them stop, but they didn’t.

  “Then six of Them came.” He stopped, staring at something only he could see.

  It took little effort for Idalia to imagine what had happened next, however, and then it did take an effort to keep from grabbing him and shaking him until his teeth rattled. They should never have left him to himself for so long without checking on him. He might have listened to her, or maybe not, but he would certainly have listened to Vestakia or Kardus.

  What he would not have done was gone looking for Demons while he was all alone, no matter how much the Allies needed to know what he might learn.

  “They saw you, didn’t They?” she said quietly.

  Cilarnen jerked as if he’d been stung by a wasp, and stared at her in startled surprise. Then understanding grew in his expression as he realized how she must know. She’d faced the Demon Queen through Kindolhinadetil’
s Mirror.

  “I thought I’d been careful enough. I’d shielded the glyph. It went undetected in Armethalieh—if it had not, the Stone Golems in the Council Chamber would have alerted the Mages. But They knew I was watching all along. They wanted me to watch, as They … played with the people there.”

  “That is Their way,” Kardus said gravely. “They wish to spoil everything They touch. They are the enemy of all who walk in the Light.”

  “And now all those people are dead,” Cilarnen said, a despairing note in his voice. “And Anigrel will make it seem as if the Wildmages are responsible, and make everyone in the City even more terrified of Wildmages, if that’s even possible. Idalia, you’ll never get an alliance now. He’s seen to that.”

  She wasn’t going to let him talk himself into a complete blue funk.

  “Unfortunately, They’ve made one huge mistake. You saw what really happened at Nerendale—and you can testify to that before the High Council under Truthspell,” Idalia said.

  Cilarnen stared at her, hope and confusion mixed in his expression. “But… I’ve been Banished,” he said blankly.

  Idalia laughed shortly. “Somehow, Cilarnen, I think the entire Elven Army at your back might just be able to reverse that decree. But what you need right now is a bowl of soup and a warm bed. I’ll inform Redhelwar about this now, but I don’t think you’ll be making your report to him until sometime tomorrow, because horrible as this news is, it isn’t urgent.

  “But once you’ve recovered, if you can use the High Magick to see places that we can’t, don’t be surprised if Redhelwar has a long list of tasks for you.”

  Cilarnen drew a deep breath, obviously at the end of his strength. “If I’m all that Armethalieh can send to help, be sure that I will do all I can.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hare and Hound