The Spirit Stone

Lakanza, the grey-haired high priestess, stood next to Rocca with a scroll in one hand. In front of them Sidro knelt with her head bowed, while the two Horsekin holy women stood off to one side, their faces grim, their hands clenched into fists. As Salamander watched, Lakanza unrolled a few inches of the scroll and studied it for a moment. Sidro raised her head and looked at Rocca with such venomous hatred in her blue eyes that Rocca took an involuntary step back, but when Lakanza lowered the scroll, Sidro ducked her head to stare at the ground.

Although Salamander could hear nothing, he could see Lakanza’s mouth moving in some sort of chant. She raised a hand and beckoned to one of the Horsekin priestesses. The woman stepped forward and took the wyvern dagger out of its box. She grabbed Sidro’s long raven-black hair with one hand and raised the dagger with the other. Salamander yelped aloud, thinking he was about to see Sidro’s throat slit. Instead, the woman pulled Sidro’s hair taut and used the dagger to hack it off, cropping it close to her skull. Sidro endured the ritual with her mouth tight-set and her eyes shut.

Disgraced, Salamander thought. Serves her right, too, nearly getting me killed like that! Yet what had she done, after all, but tell the truth and identify an enemy of her people? Salamander’s conscience bit him hard. No one would listen to her now, but she had guessed the truth – he was one of Vandar’s spawn, just as she’d said. His supposedly miraculous escape might well bring disaster upon the fortress and shrine both.

Once she’d cut off Sidro’s hair, the Horsekin woman turned and threw it into the wind, which took and scattered the long strands. A few more words from Lakanza, and Sidro rose, picking up the things lying at her feet – a sack and a blanket. Salamander watched as she left the fort and set off on the trail heading north to the forest lands. Had she been thrown out of the holy order? Not likely, since she still wore the painted dress that marked her as a priestess. More likely she’d merely been sent out to preach to the distant believers, much as Rocca had done. She might even be heading to Lord Honelg’s dun. If so, she’d walk right into Ridvar’s fortguard and end up a prisoner in Dun Cengarn.

When Salamander widened his Sight to look over the fortress, he saw the raven mazrak drifting on the air currents far above her. Impossible! he thought. Less than a full day before, the raven had flown over the Red Wolf dun, a distance of at least three hundred miles. Ye gods, don’t tell me there are two of them! Salamander broke the vision with a quick stab of fear at the very thought of there being more than one powerful mazrak ranged against them. Then he remembered the astral tunnel.

‘Don’t you think it’s likely,’ Salamander asked Dallandra later, ‘that he’s discovered how to get onto the mother roads?’

‘Yes, I certainly do,’ Dallandra said. ‘Much more likely, in fact, than there being two of these wretched mazrakir. So that’s what that tunnel was for! Huh, that’s interesting. It’s never occurred to me to try to gain the roads from the astral. It’s not part of Deverry dweomer, either. I wonder where he learned that?’

‘Bardek, I suppose. You thought at one point that he might be from there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, and he could be. But however he learned it, that he can work that dweomer means he’s a man of great power, so be careful.’

‘I shall be, never fear. Let us most devoutly hope that he can’t lead armies through those tunnels.’

‘It’s highly unlikely, since they originate on the astral.’

‘An entire army of dweomermasters does strike me as a very distant prospect, now that you mention it. Here’s another odd thing. Neb told me that he feels some sort of link to our mazrak from an ill-defined past wyrd they seem to share. He couldn’t tell me much more than that. It’s not a pleasant link, however. That he does know.’

‘Oh by the Star Goddesses!’ Dallandra’s image looked abruptly weary. ‘I don’t know why I’m even surprised. Nevyn made a great many enemies during his long life.’

‘That’s certainly true. I remember a whole ugly clutch of them very clearly indeed, being as I was involved in hunting them down. Off in Bardek, that was, our little war with the dark dweomer –’ Salamander abruptly paused, his mind flooded by a surge of memories and omen-warnings both. ‘The black stone. The obsidian gem on Alshandra’s altar. It has something to do with all of this. I know it in my soul, but I can’t say why or what.’

‘Then meditate upon it.’ Dallandra’s thoughts rang with urgency. ‘Brood over it like a mare with a weak-legged foal.’

‘I shall. I’d wager high that this is a matter of wyrd, something ancient and deep. It involves me, too, though I’m not sure how.’

And indeed, Salamander was right enough about that. During his early childhood, when forming and keeping clear memories lay beyond him, the raven mazrak and the black pyramid had woven a net of wyrd around him. It had snared even a man as powerful as Nevyn, the Master of the Aethyr – which had been Neb’s name and dweomer title in the body he wore then, back in those far-off days.

PART I

Dun Deverry and The Westlands Spring, 983

Every light casts a shadow. The dweomer light has cast a darkness of darkness. In that vile night creep those who once were men even as you, thinking that they craved secrets only to ease the suffering of the world. Somewhere along their way, the shadow crept over them unawares …

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

Built as it was across seven hills, the city of Dun Deverry towered above the surrounding farmlands. Riding up from the south, Nevyn saw it from a long distance away as a cluster of grey and green shapes on the horizon. The road twisted, swinging at times a mile off the straight as it meandered around a lord’s dun or rambled along a stream till it finally reached a ford or bridge where a traveller could cross. As the road changed direction, the city seemed to dance on the horizon, now to the east, then to the west, showing him different views as he drew closer. A little while before sunset he finally rode up the last hill, and by then, the city loomed over him like a thunder cloud. The south gates had been repaired since the last time Nevyn had seen them, over a hundred years before, when they’d been only ragged heaps of stone and broken planks. Now they stood twelve feet high and over twenty broad, made of stout oak banded with iron. Each band sported an elaborate engraved design of interlaced wyverns, and on the portion of wall directly above the gates stood a wyvern rampant, carved in pale marble.

Since the stone wall holding them was a good fifteen feet thick, the gates opened into a sort of tunnel, which eventually led onto a cobbled square. Oak saplings, dusted green with their first leaves, stood round the edges. Out in the centre a good many townsfolk were standing around the stone pool of a fountain, gossiping no doubt, but none of them paid any attention to Nevyn, a shabby old herbman leading a laden pack mule and a scruffy riding horse, all three of them covered with dust from the road.

Nevyn, however, studied the townsfolk. As he followed the twisting street uphill past rows of prosperous-looking shops, he kept looking around him, appraising the faces of the people he passed. He’d come to Dun Deverry on two errands. For one, he was searching for a particular young woman who had been his apprentice many a long year before. Everywhere he’d been in the years since her death, he’d searched but never found her. He was hoping that since she’d died in Dun Deverry, she’d been reborn there. She would look very different, of course, but he knew that he’d recognize Lilli when he saw her again. The other errand was far more complicated. To accomplish it, he’d need the help of friends.

Olnadd, priest of Wmm, the god of scribes, lived in a shabby little house not far from the west gate. A brown wooden palisade enclosed the thatch-roofed house, a vegetable garden, and a pair of white geese. When Nevyn arrived at the gate, the geese stopped hunting snails to glare at him. He laid a hand on the latch. Hissing and honking, the pair rushed forward with a great flapping of white wings. His horse and pack mule both threw up their heads and began pulling on reins and halter-rope. As soon as Nevyn let go of the gate, the geese subsided.

‘Olnadd,’ Nevyn called out. ‘Olnadd! Anyone here?’

The front door opened, and the priest hurried out, a slender man with a slick, sparse cap of grey hair. In daily life Wmm’s priests dressed much as other Deverry men did, in plain wool brigga with a linen shirt belted over them. Olnadd’s shirt sported yokes embroidered with pelicans, the sacred bird of his god.

‘Whist, whist,’ he called out, ‘get back!’

The geese retreated, but not far.

‘My apologies,’ Olnadd said. ‘They’re better than watchdogs, truly.’

‘So I see. You don’t look surprised to see me, so I take it that my letter reached you.’

‘It did.’ Olnadd opened the gate and stepped out, shutting it quickly behind him. ‘Let’s take your horse and mule around to the mews. I’ve got a shed out there that will do for a stable.’

Once his animals were unloaded and at their hay, Nevyn followed Olnadd into the house. The priest’s wife, a tall, rangy woman who wore her grey hair in braids round her head, greeted him with a smile and ushered them both into her kitchen. They sat at the table near a sunny window. Affyna brought out a plate of cakes and cups of boiled milk sweetened with honey.

‘So, then.’ Olnadd helped himself to a raisin cake. ‘What brings you to us?’

‘A rather curious business,’ Nevyn said. ‘I want to see the king. I’ve made him a talisman, you see, a little gift for the blood royal.’

‘Little gift?’ Affyna said. ‘If you’ve made it, it must positively reek of dweomer. Well, I suppose reek isn’t quite the word I mean.’

‘It will do, truly.’ Nevyn grinned at her. ‘The question now is, how do I get an audience with our liege to give it to him?’

‘That will take a bit of doing,’ Olnadd said. ‘I don’t suppose we should pry, but I can’t say I’d mind having a look at the thing.’

‘I shouldn’t admit this, but I wouldn’t mind showing it off. It’s taken me a cursed lot of hard work.’ Nevyn reached into his shirt, pulled out the slender chain he wore around his neck, and unfastened a small leather pouch. He slid out its contents, wrapped in layers of silk.

‘Close those shutters, will you?’

Olnadd got up and did so. One ray of light came through the crack and fell across the table in a line of gold. Nevyn drew a circle deosil around the bundle with his hand, visualized four tiny pentagrams at its cardinal points, and cleared the space around the talisman of all influences – not that evil or impure forces would be lying about the priest’s breakfast table, but Nevyn didn’t care to have the stone pick up traces of local gossip. He unwrapped the five pieces of silk: the first, mottled with olive, citrine, russet and black; the second, purple; the third, Wmm’s own orange; the fourth an emerald green, and the last pale lavender.

In the centre of the silks lay an opal, as big as a walnut, but so perfectly round, so smoothly polished, that it seemed to breathe and glow with a life of its own. Affyna sighed sharply, and Olnadd muttered a few words of prayer under his breath.

‘It’s commemorated through Bran and the great Gwindyc, you see,’ Nevyn said. ‘I’ve linked it up through the Kings of the Wildlands to the golden root of dominion. Not a word of this to anyone, mind.’

‘And is there anyone else in Dun Deverry who’d know what I was talking about if I told them?’

‘Not half likely, is it?’ Nevyn glanced at Affyna.

She smiled again. ‘Any woman who marries a priest learns to hold her tongue.’

One piece at a time, smoothing out wrinkles, Nevyn wrapped the opal back up in its silken shrouds. He returned it to the pouch, then wiped the dweomer circle away from the table. Olnadd got up and opened the shutters to let in the spring air.

‘And what kind of man is our king?’ Nevyn said. ‘I knew his grandfather, you see, but I haven’t been at court in a cursed long time.’

Olnadd considered, rubbing his chin.

‘Hard to say. Now, he used to be the wild sort, Casyl, when he was the Marked Prince, but wedding the sovereignty changes a man. He’s held the kingship only a year now, but he seems to be steadying down.’

‘Seems to be?’

‘Well, he’s a splendid warrior. Very useful just now.’ Olnadd considered again, picking up his cup and twisting it between his long fingers. ‘But the emotional sort. Given to quick judgments and – well – gestures. Things fit for bard songs, a lot of talk about honour – you know the sort.’

‘How easy is it for a subject to see his highness? I’ve brought a good bit of coin to bribe servants.’

‘You’ll need it, but I can smooth your way and save some of your silver. The scribes all come to the temple, of course, for worship. The head scribe’s an interesting sort. Truly, he should have come to us for the priesthood, but he has a taste for power. Coin will be out of place for our Petyc. We’ll go down to the bookseller’s and see what we can find.’

‘A bookseller? Ye gods, Dun Deverry’s turning into a grand city indeed.’

‘It is, at that. We might find a rare volume, even, but if not, there’ll be somewhat there that will make a decent gift. Then I’ll introduce you. Petyc will speak to the chamberlain if he likes you. A little gift might be in order for the chamberlain, but a few coins in a pouch should do. There’s naught subtle about him, truly.’

‘My thanks. I’d like to get this settled before King Casyl goes off to the summer’s fighting.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt you can. The gossip tells me that he won’t ride north for another fortnight or so.’

‘Well and good, then. Ye gods! Another war in Cerrgonney!’

‘Now, now!’ Affyna paused for a sly smile. ‘The king never says war. It’s a rebellion, according to him.’

‘And when did the Boar clan swear fealty to the royal Wyvern?’ Nevyn said.

‘Oh, according to our present king’s father, it was round about 962 or so. Gwerbretion, he called their lords, and how could they be gwerbretion if they hadn’t sworn to him?’ Olnadd rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘We can’t doubt the king, can we now? He had it on the best authority – his own.’

They all shared a laugh but a grim one. In truth, Cerrgonney had been an independent kingdom for the past hundred and thirty-odd years, though kingdom was perhaps too grand a word for that rocky land filled with feuds, factions, and petty hatreds. The High King’s vassals, however, would support a war more readily if it were presented as putting down a rebellion rather than outright conquest.

‘And of course his scribes will write down what he tells them to,’ Affyna said, ‘and the royal bards sing the correct verses.’

‘Indeed,’ Nevyn said. ‘But ye gods, another war with the cursed Boars. I wonder if we’ll ever see the end of them?’

‘Now here!’ Olnadd gave him a grin. ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

‘I can’t, alas. The dweomer tells a man what he needs to know and little else.’

That night Nevyn retired early to the small spare guest chamber to work an elaborate piece of dweomer. As much as false omens and pretentious glamours annoyed him, he knew that he’d need them. He’d worked too hard on the opal talisman to have the king accept it lightly, and if he simply gained an audience and handed it over, the king most likely would underestimate its importance. Many years before, Nevyn had successfully used a certain kind of magical trick to shorten a rebellion against the current king’s grandfather. Quite possibly he could use it to benefit the grandson as well.

Nevyn lay down on the bed, slowed his breathing, and visualized the sigils that would lead him out to the etheric plane. In his mind he saw the blue light gather; then suddenly it flooded the room. The walls, dead things, turned black, while the air and its spirits pulsed around him with a sapphire glow. To travel on this plane he would need his body of light, but he had worked this dweomer so often that it came to him almost automatically. He’d created from the etheric substance a body, solid blue against the flux, shaped like a man wearing brigga and a shirt, though lacking detail, and joined to his solar plexus by a silver cord. Nevyn transferred his consciousness into it and looked down at his physical body, lying inert and apparently asleep on the bed below. He rose up higher, slipped out of the house, and hovered in the air. Above him the stars gleamed, great silver whorls and streaks against the night sky.

Down below, flickering in the silvery-blue etheric light, the houses and streets of Dun Deverry spread out, black and sullen with stone and tile. Here and there a garden or a tree gleamed with a reddish vegetable aura. Here and there as well the bright ovoid auras of human beings and animals hurried through the streets or disappeared behind dead wooden doors. Yet in an odd way the city itself did seem alive. Its history was so long and so troubled that images from the astral plane had spilled over, as it were, into the etheric, so that Nevyn could see superimposed pictures from all its times of violence and hope.

The tangle of images formed a dense flood, rising and swelling – the streets shrinking, changing place, broadening, disappearing altogether; houses rising, aging, and falling; fires raging through the streets; ghostly crowds of those who’d lived and suffered here rushing to and fro, then disappearing, leaving the desolation of the Time of Troubles, when a tiny village huddled inside shattered walls, only to swell again as the prosperity of peace returned. In the midst of the swirling flood of images, a few unchanging points stood out – the huge temple compound of Bel on one hill, the smaller temple of the Moon Goddess on another, each glowing under a silvery dweomer-shield created by the priests and priestesses. Yet always, under the mutating images, the city, the Holy City, shimmered with power, the soul of the kingdom simply because so many thousands of people believed it so.

In the centre of the city, in the heart of the glowing, surging magical web stood the king’s dun, a cluster of tall towers on the highest hill. With barely an effort Nevyn drifted towards it through the rippling etheric light. He had been born on that hill well over three hundred years ago. All the history that had taken place since his birth rose up in a second wave of images and lapped over the dun, then swirled back to allow his memories to flood over it in their place.

Once again Nevyn could see the brochs of his youth with their rough chambers and crude furnishings. In that torch-lit chamber of justice he’d infuriated his father and so set in motion the terrible mistake responsible for his unnaturally long life. With a flicker of light the image changed into the larger, more polished royal compound he’d visited as a simple herbman, then he watched the buildings crumble as rebellion and strife broke out among the great clans. In the civil wars he had installed a new king in a dun that was half in ruins from the long years of siege and betrayal.

Among the images of place he saw the empty simulacra of persons long dead, what ordinary folk call ghosts. He saw his father striding through the ruins, shouting soundless orders to vanished servants. His mother ran after, begging mercy for her unfortunate son. The Boars of Cantrae appeared, all swagger and rage. Prince Maryn and his tragic queen, Bellyra, walked through a translucent great hall. Branoic the silver dagger, Maddyn the bard, Councillor Oggyn – shadows of their forms rose up as if to greet him once again.

Among these images drifted one that Nevyn hadn’t expected to see: Lord Gerraent of the Falcon clan. The set of his broad shoulders, his easy warrior’s stance, the falcon-image embroidered on his shirt – the image was true in every detail, so much like Gerraent that Nevyn felt his old hatred for the man well up. He had been tangled with this soul’s wyrd for three hundred years, yet he would have assumed that any image seen here would have come from a much later incarnation, Owaen for instance, the captain of Prince Maryn’s personal guard. Another surprise: rather than dissolving into the general drift, this image lingered, pacing back and forth over a red glow like a carpet of fire. Finally Nevyn realized the truth, that he was seeing no mere memory-ghost, but the actual Gerraent, or rather, his soul reborn in a new body.

Nevyn dropped down through the blue light and hovered a few inches above the ground. This close he could see that the red glow emanated from a lawn, enclosed in the dead black of a stone wall. Off to one side a cluster of pulsing orange resolved itself into rose bushes, swelling with the astral tides of spring. Nevyn could see Gerraent – or whatever he was called in this life – in the midst of his aura, a typical young warrior, his sword at his side even in the midst of the king’s gardens, blond, tall, heavily muscled and every bit as arrogant as always. His aura was shot through with blind rage, a blood-coloured crackle of raw energy that Nevyn found sickening.

Nevyn’s sudden disgust seemed to touch Gerraent’s mind. He stopped his pacing and whirled around, his hand on his sword-hilt as he peered through the night. In puzzlement his aura shrank, then swirled around him. Nevyn marked him well so that he could recognize him again, then let his body of light drift upward. He was high above the ground when he saw another gold aura entering the garden, this one glowing softly around a female body. When Gerraent hurried forward to greet her, Nevyn lingered just long enough to confirm that she was no one bound to him by wyrd, then glided away.

Not far from the garden stood the heart of the king’s dun, four towers joined to a central fifth like the petals on a wild rose. In the bottom floor of the tallest tower, open windows glowed with torch light. Nevyn swung himself through one of them and found himself inside the great hall. The last time he’d seen this room it had been filled with shabby furniture, its walls hung with faded, torn tapestries, its huge hearths filthy with ash and refuse. Now the walls had been plastered and decorated with bright banners, one for each of the great clans, hanging between each pair of windows. The tables and chairs at the honour hearth shone with polish, and light winked on silver goblets. Over on the servants’ and riders’ side of the hall, the furniture was stained and old, but serviceable. Neatly braided rushes covered the entire huge floor.

Nevyn took himself over to the honour hearth, where noble lords sat drinking and a bard sang, his voice sounding oddly hollow and distorted to Nevyn’s etheric ears. Although no one sat at the king’s table, that is, the one closest to the fire, Nevyn saw a page leaving the hall with a flagon of mead on a silver tray. He followed the lad up the spiralling stone staircase, then along a familiar corridor to the king’s apartments.

Fine Bardek carpets covered the floor; elaborately carved furniture sat upon them. On a long, narrow table, candles flamed in banked silver candelabra, but they sent out as much etheric force as light, making it hard for Nevyn to see in the chamber. Looming out of the golden mist, a man with dark hair but green eyes stood by the empty hearth. His linen shirt, stiff with embroidery, displayed the red wyvern of the royal clan, and he wore brigga in the red, white, and gold royal plaid of Dun Deverry. The page set the flagon down on a little table, then bowed and walked backwards to the door. With one last bow he let himself out.

Nevyn remained, floating near the candles, and considered Casyl the Second, King of all Deverry and Eldidd. Casyl poured himself mead into a golden goblet, then sat down in a cushioned chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Finding the king alone was such a rare bit of luck that Nevyn decided to take it as a good omen. He moved closer still to the candles and began gathering both their etheric effluent and their smoke, winding it round his hands with a motion like that of a woman turning loose yarn into a proper skein. Although he couldn’t speak from the etheric, he could send thoughts to the king’s mind that to him would seem to be speech.