Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [141]
And an enemy he was. No one but a dark dweomerman would have fashioned such a showy and pretentious body of light: a figure cloaked in a black, hooded robe, hung about with sigils and signs, and belted with a strip of darkness from which hung two severed heads. The figure retreated a few paces, then hovered uncertainly. Nevyn could make out a face inside the hood, two eyes that glowed with the life of the soul inside the simulacrum, and a mouth that worked constantly, forming soundless words. Wherever his body was, it was talking automatically and relaying information to a listener.
“An apprentice, are you?” Nevyn sent out the thought to his consciousness. “Was your master too much of a coward to risk facing me?”
The figure flew away from him, but as Nevyn started after, it held steady. From the terror in the apprentice’s eyes, Nevyn could guess that his master was forcing him to stay and face the enemy.
“Who are you?” The apprentice sent out a tremulous thought.
Nevyn debated, then decided that the truth might be the best stick he had for driving these hounds away.
“Tell your master that in this plane I’m known as the Master of Aethyr, but on the physical, I’m no one at all.”
Nevyn saw the mouth working; then the apprentice sent out a thought wave of sheer terror. The simulacrum swooped to one side, tumbled back, then began to break up, the black robe shredding and dissolving as the hood fell away. Thrashing desperately before him was the simple etheric double of a young man, and the silver cord that should have bound him to his body was broken, dangling from his navel. The master had killed his apprentice rather than risk letting Nevyn follow him back to their hiding place.
“You poor little fool!” Nevyn thought to him. “Do you see now what kind of master you trusted? You have one last chance to repent. I beg you, call on the Light and forswear the Dark Path now!”
In a thought sending of pure rage, the apprentice raced away, swooping, tumbling, but rising ever higher into the billows of the blue light. Nevyn let him go, but sorrowfully. He would have liked to have redeemed that soul, but soon enough, the Lords of Wyrd would catch the apprentice and drag him, kicking and screaming, to the hall of light. How they called judgment upon him was no longer Nevyn’s concern.
Nevyn followed the silver cord back to his body and slipped in, slapping his hand thrice on the ground to close the working. When he sat up, Aderyn leaned close, listening carefully as he told the story.
“I think me that our enemy is someone who knows you well,” Aderyn said.
“So it seems. Well, that apprentice of his is better off dead. He won’t be getting himself deeper into that black muck.”
“True spoken. Huh. If the master is that terrified of you, I doubt if he’ll come sniffing around here again tonight.”
“He won’t be able to. Losing an apprentice is a hard blow for one of the dark ones. The masters feed off their vitality, you see, with an etheric link. I’ll wager he’s sick and shaking right now. Good.”
Aderyn shuddered. Like most dweomerfolk in the kingdom, he’d had little contact with the masters of the dark art. But Nevyn was Master of the Aethyr, set like a guard on the border of the kingdom’s soul, on constant watch against unclean things that few of those he guarded knew existed. He stood up and began brushing the leaves and dirt off his clothes.
“Let’s get back to camp. I want to set a special seal over Rhodry’s aura.”
Some miles away, Loddlaen lay in his tent and tried to sleep. He twisted this way and that, silently cursed the men making noise outside, and even considered drinking himself blind with mead. He was so exhausted that his body felt like a sack of stones, but every time he drifted off, some thought or image would jerk his mind awake. Finally he surrendered and tried to summon the darkness. He imagined the point of black in his