Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [162]
At length, when they came to a little stream running in a valley between two hills, Nevyn pulled his tiny warband to a halt.
“Very well, silver daggers. The farm lies just on the other side of this hill. Here are your orders. I’m going to lie down and go into a deep trance. You two tie up the horses, then stand guard over my body. It’s just possible that Alastyr will send his apprentice out to try to kill me.”
“He’ll never get past my sword,” Rhodry said.
“No doubt—but if I lose this battle, we’ll meet someday in the Otherlands.” He turned to Jill. “If I die, child, pray with all your heart and soul to the Light that lies behind the moon, and don’t you tell me that you don’t know what I mean.”
Jill caught her breath with a gasp, but even though his heart ached for her, Nevyn had no more time for words. He spread his cloak on the ground, lay on his back upon it, and folded his arms over his chest, positioning each hand on the opposite shoulder. First he invoked the Lords of Light, then lay quietly, gathering strength. Nearby Jill and Rhodry stood with drawn swords. As he closed his eyes, he wondered if he’d ever see them again.
Slowly and carefully within his mind, Nevyn summoned his body of light, a pale-blue simulacrum of his own form, but stripped down to the essentials and joined to his solar plexus by a silver cord. When Nevyn transferred his consciousness over to this form, he felt as if the physical body were dropping sharply away. For the briefest of moments he felt nauseated; then he heard a sound, a click like a sword striking a shield, and he was looking out of the simulacrum’s eyes. His physical body lay below him in a world filled with the blue light of the etheric plane. Since he’d withdrawn from it, his own body looked like a lump of dead flesh and nothing more, but he could see Jill and Rhodry as two egg-shaped whorls of flame, their auras pulsing round them. The trees and the grass glowed dull red with vegetable-life force.
Nevyn rose about ten feet above his body, the silver cord paying out behind him like a fisherman’s line, and looked round. The stream that flowed through the valley might well be useful, he decided, because crossing running water in the body of light is dangerous in the extreme. In the blue light the stream ran silver, and above it drifted its elemental current, visible as a troubled, shifting wall of smoky stuff, a snare if only he could get his weasel into it. He rose higher and drifted toward the crest of the hill. It was time to throw his challenge.
Down on the other side of the hill was a grassy meadow, and in it lay the farmstead, a crumbling roundhouse behind an earthen wall, some sheds, a few fruit trees so old that their life glow was more a brown than a red. Nevyn smiled to himself; the seals were down. Alastyr must have scried out the warband and let them fall in panic. All at once he saw a man run out of the house and head toward a shed with his arms full of saddlebags. He decided that he’d best keep his enemies too busy to think of killing Camdel.
Out of the glowing blue light Nevyn fashioned a spear shape with his mind, then threw it hard for the running man’s dark-shot aura. When it struck, the fellow dropped the saddlebags and screamed aloud. Although his physical body would feel no pain, his trained mind must have felt it searing like a hot iron. With the swoop of a striking falcon, Nevyn flew over the farmhouse as the man ran back inside.
“Alastyr!” he called out in a long exhalation of thought. “Alastyr, I’ve come for you!”
He heard an answering howl echo through the blue light. Like a snake striking up from the ground, Alastyr rushed to meet him. His simulacrum was a huge, black-robed figure, hung with