Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [117]
“Just so. Do you still think he’s merely insane?”
“I do. If he’d truly gone over to the Dark Path and its foul ways, he’d be hiding himself, not flaunting his gifts and meddling with petty lords.”
“Now, that’s true spoken. Here, you know Loddlaen better than I ever will. It seems clear that he’s stirred up this blasted rebellion. Why? Is he trying to escape being brought to justice for that murder he did? If so, his scheme won’t work. It doesn’t matter who Corbyn’s overlord is. Gwerbret Rhys would haul him into the malover as readily as Lovyan would.”
“True spoken, and I’ve been puzzling himself over this very question. At first I thought he had some scheme of killing me or at least the other two witnesses I’m bringing, but if that were true, why involve Rhodry and half the tierynrhyn? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t, and I think me we’d best find out just what he thinks he’s up to.”
Aderyn laughed, a harsh mutter.
“If we can. That’s the crux, my friend. If we can.”
After he finished talking with Aderyn, Nevyn sat up brooding for a long time, hoping that Aderyn was right about Loddlaen only being mad. Truly, the lad had been unstable from the beginning. Studying dweomer demands a perfect stability of mind, a core of simple common sense, in fact, because the forces that dweomer invokes can tear an unstable mind to pieces, leaving it prey to delusions and fantasies. Loddlaen had never had iron in his soul, only the malleable silver of a raw psychic talent that should have been suppressed, not encouraged. At least, if Aderyn was right, Loddlaen was only misusing his dweomer, not immersing himself in strange and unclean things. Just as every light casts a shadow, so does a dark dweomer exist. The men who study it (and they never open their foul ranks to women) lust after power above all else and hoard it like misers, never helping but only harming other souls. They grub around the dark places of the Innerlands for peculiar magicks and keep themselves alive unnaturally by feeding on the vitality of spirits and living people alike. Nevyn was sworn to destroy such as them wherever he found them, and they knew it, and hid from him.
Scattered over a wild meadow, the army of Lord Corbyn and his allies lay asleep under the starry sky. Surefooted in the dark, Loddlaen picked his way through the camp and out with a muttered word to one of the guards. The stink of so many unwashed humans was making him feel ill, and he walked a good long ways away from camp before he flung himself down in the grass to rest. He was tired—he was always tired these days—yet when night came, he could not sleep. He pressed both hands against his forehead and tried to steady himself. The despised smell that he’d left behind him seemed to cling to his body and clothes. Suddenly he saw the smell, a thick gray cloud of smoke, swirling around him in some unfelt wind. It was only a vision, an illusion, but he had to fight to banish it. Many visions came to him unbidden these days, just odd little things, voices half heard, things half seen, and always he could understand the cause, but still they were terrifying, because he knew that they should never have come at all. A dweomerman works long years to open his mind to the Innerlands, but at the same time he has to close his mind at will, to draw a veil between himself and unseen things. No matter how hard Loddlaen tried to close that veil, things slipped through.
When he looked up at the stars, they were dancing and leaping, sending long points of light like reflections off a polished blade. Hastily he looked away, but creatures seemed to be crawling through the grass, like little weasels, sniffing him out. He flung up one hand and made the banishing sigils in the air. When he looked the weasel things were gone, and the stars steady. With a sigh that was half a groan, he flung himself face down to lie full length in the grass. The broken light from the stars seemed to dance in