Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [161]
“We’re leaving at the break of day,” Alastyr announced. “I’d rather take our chances with the Brotherhood than with the Master of the Aethyr.”
“Well and good, master. I’ll pack some of the gear tonight.”
“Good.” He turned to Camdel. “As for you, if you cooperate with us, you’ll live. We’re traveling fast, and if you cause the least bit of trouble, you die. Understand?”
Camdel nodded a cowed agreement. Alastyr turned on his heel and strode back to the ritual chamber. He had to keep up his guard.
The plan was risky, Nevyn knew, but he had to act fast. As he sat on horseback in the torch-lit ward with Jill and Rhodry, Nevyn shuddered. The battle ahead would be a hard one, and against two opponents if this apprentice had the skill to fight alongside his master. Around him twenty-five of Blaen’s best men were saddling their horses, while the gwerbret walked through, speaking to a man here and there. Although Nevyn was throwing his dice on a long wager by taking his grace along, he needed to have something to use as a distraction.
“Now, remember what I told you,” he whispered to the two silver daggers. “At a certain point we’re slipping away from the warband.”
They nodded agreement. With a jingle of tack and scabbards, the warband mounted. Motioning to Jill and Rhodry to follow, Nevyn rode over to the gwerbret.
“Your Grace is sure he knows how to find the farm?”
“A blind man could find it from the instructions you gave. Don’t worry, good sorcerer. We’ll dig these rats out of their holes.”
When the warband rode out, Nevyn kept Rhodry and Jill with him at the very rear. He tossed his reins to the lad and told him to lead his horse along. Since he was needed to go into a light trance, it would be difficult enough to stay in the saddle without worrying about guiding his horse. As the warband clattered down the night-dark road, Nevyn slowed his breathing and withdrew his consciousness from the world around him. To an observer he would have looked half-asleep, his head bobbing in time to the horse’s motion. Through half-lidded eyes he watched the warband and set to work.
First he called upon the Great Ones and saw a beam of imagined light come to him. He meditated upon it, saw it ever more clearly in his mind, until at last it lived apart from his will, a great swath of light shaped like a sword. In his mind he caught it by the hilt and used the blade to trace a mighty sphere of light around and above the war-band. Because of the motion of the horse and the noises around him, it was a hard struggle to concentrate, but eventually he got the sphere solid and the seals—the five-pointed stars of the Kings of the Elements—set at each ordinal point and at zenith and nadir. As soon as the sphere glowed bright, he invoked the great Light that shines behind all the gods and begged permission to meddle with darkness. Slowly, carefully, he withdrew the light from the sphere while leaving its structure until there was nothing left but a solid sphere of darkness, invisible to normal eyes but a shield against scrying.
With the sphere created, Nevyn could bring his mind back to the normal world. He was shocked to find that the warband had traveled a good three miles; working dweomer on horseback was even harder than he’d expected. For the next hour or so, he merely rested, until they were about three miles from the farm. He went briefly back into his trance, called up the light, and let it stream back into the waiting sphere, but he cast a new wrap of darkness over Jill, Rhodry, and himself. Now he could only hope that Alastyr had the common sense to keep a scrying watch. If he had, he would see that sphere, blazoned with the sigils of the light, riding straight for his hiding place. Nevyn wanted him to panic, and to panic thoroughly.
“Jill, Rhodry,” he whispered. “Now!”
They slowed their horses to match his pace, tagging after the warband for a few hundred yards until there was a good distance between them and the unsuspecting