Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [122]
Nevyn lay down on his back in the grass and crossed his arms over his chest. Aderyn stood nearby, ready to keep anyone from disturbing him. Nevyn slowed his breathing, then closed his eyes. In his mind, he pictured his body of light, a simple manlike form made out of a bluish glow and joined to his solar plexus with a silver cord. He refined the form until it seemed solid, then imagined that he was looking out of its eyes and transferred his consciousness over. He heard a sharp click, like a sword striking a shield, and felt his body drop away. He was indeed looking out of the simulacrum’s eyes at his sleeping body lying about ten feet below him. Nearby, Aderyn’s aura was a pulsing egg of soft golden light, his body just visible within it.
Rust red with a vegetable aura, the meadowlands spread out under the shimmering blue light of the etheric plane. The stream was a tall veil of elemental force, extending about fifty feet into the air, like a silver waterfall with no river above. Nevyn floated up higher, the silver cord paying out behind him, until he was about a hundred yards away from his body. Upstream the army was a fiery glow of intermingled auras, pulsing and swarming as the men walked around, a mix of many colors, but the predominant one was the blood red of true killers. To Nevyn it was an ugly sight, but he’d be looking for another just like it. He went up higher, then flew, gliding over the landscape below in the cold blue light.
As he headed north, the Wildfolk came to join him. Here on their true plane of existence, they had no bodies at all but were beautiful shimmering nexuses of lines of colored light. At times they refracted out into a pattern like the glimmer of a bright star; at others, they shrank to a core of consciousness. As Nevyn’s body of light carried his mind along, the Wildfolk wheeled around him like seagulls round a ship. As much as Nevyn loved them, they were also a nuisance. If Loddlaen happened to be up on the etheric, he would see this army of lights coming from miles away. When Nevyn ordered them away, the Wildfolk fled.
After some time—as much as one can measure time on the etheric, anyway—Nevyn saw a glowing dome of light in a meadow off to one side of his path. He checked his flight and drifted over. The pale silver dome covered fully an acre, and it was marked at the four cardinal points and the zenith by flaming pentagrams traced in different colors and set around with the sigils of the elements, altogether a showy and pretentious job of setting an astral seal. Under it, doubtless, lay Corbyn’s army. The dome told Nevyn just how afraid of Aderyn Loddlaen must be, to exert so much energy to build himself a shelter. Nevyn drifted up until he hovered over the pentagram that shone with the pale purple of the element of Aethyr.
“In the name of the Kings, allow me to pass by.”
Like a hatch cover on a ship, the pentagram lifted. So much for Loddlaen’s mighty magicks, Nevyn thought. He might well be daft, at that.
Slowly and cautiously Nevyn sank down through the opening. Loddlaen might well have felt his entry and come to challenge him, yet he saw nothing but the pulsing, swarming red mass of the army below. He dropped down close enough to begin to sort out the shapes of the overlapped auras of men and horses, but it was impossible to count them. Rhodry would have to be content with the information that Corbyn’s army was much the same size as his own.
As he drifted this way and that, Nevyn saw a pair of men off by themselves and floated over for a better look. One aura was blood red shot with darkness, and it spun unevenly around the body within. A thin rope of gauzy light fastened it to the other, a shifting, pulsating mass of color that changed as Nevyn watched from gold to sickly olive green. Nevyn could easily guess that the red aura belonged to Corbyn, ensorceled and bound to Loddlaen. Loddlaen’s aura changed again to mottled brown and gold, then swelled only to contract suddenly. Ah, ye gods, Nevyn thought, he’s so far