Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [35]
The visions came cloudy, barely forming before they dissolved, thrown together and torn apart like clouds in a high wind, and he saw naught there of Glyn’s Wyrd. Even in the Inner Lands (that is, the astral plane), the currents were troubled, the forces out of balance, the light shadowed. For every kingdom or people, there’s a corresponding part of the upper astral—some magicians call it a place, which will do—that’s the true source of the events that come to the kingdom on the Outer Lands, that is, the physical world, just as every person has a secret and undying soul, which determines what that person calls his will or his luck. The Deverry folk saw wars raging between ambitious men; those men saw themselves as the authors of their actions; Nevyn saw the truth. The petty squabbles of would-be kings were only symptoms of the crisis, like the fever is only the symptom of the disease, a painful thing in itself, but not the true killer. Deep in the Inner Lands, the dark forces of Unbalanced Death were out of control, sweeping all into chaos, with only a handful of warriors who served the Light to pit themselves against them. Although Nevyn was only the humble servant of those Great Ones, he had his own part of the war to fight in the kingdom. After all, a fever may kill a patient if it’s allowed to burn unchecked.
Now, mind that you never think of these forces of Unbalanced Death as persons, some sort of evil army led by beings with a recognizable soul. On the contrary, they are forces as natural in their own way as falling rain, but they were, in this case, out of control like a river in flood tide, swelling over its banks and sweeping farms and towns before it. Every people or kingdom has a streak of chaos in its soul, weakness, greed, small prides, and arrogance, which can be either denied or given in to. When indulged, this convocation of chaos releases energy—to use a metaphor—which flows to the appropriate dark place in the Inner Lands. So it was with Deverry in that troubled time. The forces were swollen and sweeping down, exactly like that river.
How far could he intervene on the physical plane? Nevyn quite simply didn’t know. The work of the dweomer is subtle, a thing of influences, images, and slow inner working. Direct action in the world is normally so foreign to a dweomer-master that Nevyn was afraid to intervene until the time was exactly right. A wrong action, even to the right end, would only score another victory for Chaos and the Dark. Yet it ached his heart to wait, to watch the death, the sickness, the suffering, and the poverty that the wars were spreading across the kingdom. The worst thing of all was knowing that here and there were the evil masters of the dark dweomer, gloating over the suffering and sucking up the power released by the Chaos tide for their own dark ends. Their time will come, he reminded himself. For them is the dark at the end of the world, the curse at the end of the ages of ages.
But he as servant couldn’t send them to the dark before their time, any more than he could see if Glyn would someday rule a peaceful kingdom in Dun Deverry. With a sigh he broke off his fruitless meditations and banished the star and the circle. He went to his window and leaned out, watching the warriors hurry across the ward far below on their way to the great hall for dinner. Seeing them laughing and jesting stabbed guilt into his heart. His old fault had ripened the war, or so he saw it. Long ago, when he’d been a prince of the realm, he’d been given the choice between marrying Brangwen of the Falcon clan, and thus making slower progress in learning dweomer (since he would have a wife and children to care for), or casting her off and devoting himself to the craft. In his clumsy attempt to have the best of both choices, he’d brought three people to their deaths: Brangwen herself, her brother Gerraent, who’d loved her with an incestuous and unholy passion,