Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [183]
All at once he was terrified. He heard small noises, a rustling at the windows as if something were trying to get in. As he started down the steps he heard the distant laughter, heard music playing like a whisper on the wind that suddenly blew around his tower. In panic he ran, clattering down the steps, leaping from floor to floor, till at last he reached the safe silence of the bottom story, where the statues of long-dead archons stared at him as if disapproving of his unseemly haste.
There he calmed himself. The tower was only a mental image, his construct, quite unreal, and he’d been a stupid fool to give in to that inexplicable fear. All that he had to do was open his eyes and the temple would disappear back into his memory. Yet he wondered then just how real the temple might have become, if perhaps he might find it—or some strange, distorted version of it—waiting for him on the astral plane if he traveled there to look. For a moment he was afraid to attempt opening his eyes in case he found himself trapped in the vision. Then he forced himself to walk out one of the sunlit doors, to look at the mental hillside—and to open his eyes.
His familiar room appeared to him, his desk, the litter of scrolls, the tiled floor, the open window. With a sight that was closer to a gasp of relief, he got up and went on trembling legs to ring the gong for a servant. One of his well-trained young men appeared almost immediately.
“Bring chilled wine—white, but not one of the best vintages.”
The slave bobbed his head, then ducked out of the room. The Old One waddled back to his chair and sat down heavily, cursing in his mind Rhodry Maelwaedd and his entire clan. Then he reminded himself that Rhodry was only a minor irritant compared to the Master of the Aethyr. It was Nevyn who had destroyed Alastyr, Nevyn who had trapped his apprentice, Nevyn who stood like a dun wall between the Old One and his ultimate goal, that of exciting such hatred and suspicion between Deverry men and the Westfolk that open war would rage between them. In the end the men of Deverry would win. The elven race were few in number; they had few children, too, while human beings bred like rats. If things came to a long war, then the world would be rid of the elves.
It was not, mind, that the Old One hated the elves in any emotional sense. They were, quite simply, in his way with their instinctive honor and their affinity for the dweomer of Light. He didn’t need their obscure predictions and image-workings to tell him that if ever their dweomer joined forces with the dweomer of Deverry on any wide front, then his Dark Brotherhood was doomed. He had no intention of letting such a thing happen. The Maelwaedd clan, and especially Rhodry, were marked by the omens to be the reconcilers between elf and man in some convoluted way that the Old One couldn’t fathom, and thus, they too must die. Yet as he brooded over his wine that afternoon, his simple irritation that Rhodry had ruined his plans grew into something close to a hatred, and that rage grew until it spilled over onto Rhodry’s clan and, most of all, Rhodry’s protector, Nevyn himself.
Long did he consider, until at last he found the seed of a plan. Every man in the Dark Brotherhood was threatened by this summer’s turn of events. No doubt he could call a meeting of the council and convince them to join forces to wipe the threat away. They would have to plan carefully, work slowly, and hide their actual dweomer until the end, but if all went well, they would win.
“Oh, yes,” he said aloud. “The Master of the Aethyr must die.”
APPENDIX B — GLOSSARY
Aber (Deverrian) A river mouth, an estuary.
Alar (Elvish) A group of elves, who may or may not be bloodkin, who choose to travel together for some indefinite period of time.
Alardan (Elv.) The meeting of several alarli, usually the occasion for a drunken party.
Angwidd (Dev.) Unexplored, unknown.
Annwn (Welsh, literally “no place”) The name of the world