Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [81]
“It’s so huge,” Garin said. “Ye gods, it’s as big as a Deverrian house.”
“They’re not known for their daintiness, dragons,” Brel snapped. “Now get a move on, man!”
With the warleader laughing at him, Garin drew himself up and strode forward, quite boldly once the dragon waddled over to the river and turned its back to drink. He reached out to shake Rhodry’s hand, but the moment he got a look at his friend’s face, his celebratory mood vanished.
“What’s so wrong?” Garin spoke in Deverrian.
“Don’t you know?” Rhodry answered in the same. “Your farmlands! They’ve been pillaged, and your people are all dead. It was Horsekin.”
Garin’s breath deserted him in a cold stab. Brel swore with three foul words.
“And you want me to take men away?” Brel hissed in Dwarvish. “For some worm-riddled human lord?”
With a long sigh Garin recovered himself.
“A treaty’s a treaty, and you know it as well as I do. As for the other, well, Lin Serr can muster more men than five hundred. And we’ve got a few treaties of our own to call in.” He turned to Rhodry and spoke again in the language of men. “I’d hoped to see you again in better times than this, Silver Dagger, but I thank you for the report. Here, I forget myself. This is Brel, our avro, or warleader. It’s an office rather like your cadvridoc.”
When Rhodry bowed to him, the startled avro bowed back.
“But as for the farms,” Garin went on. “No one’s come in for some days now, you see, but that’s normal enough.”
“But I sent out messengers,” Brel, snapped. “Three days back. They haven’t come home, either. I’d best sound a general alarum and straightaway.”
“Rori, where are the Horsekin now?”
“Gone.” Rhodry turned his hands palm upward. “I’ve got a tale to tell you, envoy, that’s blasted hard listening. Here, tell me somewhat first. Did Mic and Otho get back here safely?”
Again the cold stab, a kind of ice-fire, running up his spine—all Garin could do was shake his head in a no. Rhodry stared at him for a moment, then dropped his face to his hands and wept, while the dragon came padding back to his side, as if in concern.
Up in Evandar’s country, which lay beyond the physical world in the reaches of the etheric plane, a silver river flowed through a meadow, dotted with daisies and buttercups. Near the riverbank stood a pavilion of cloth-of-gold, glittering under a summer sun. To be more precise, images of these things existed, though they were far more substantial than simple pictures or thoughts. Evandar had built these forms with energy drawn straight from the currents of the upper astral, which shapes the etheric the way that the etheric shapes the physical. Over the thousands of years of his existence, he’d continually channeled energy into them until they had an existence of their own—not as solid and as stable as matter, certainly, but a presence and a duration, there in their proper plane.
The bodies his people wore were woven of the same thread. Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when Evandar and his people were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind” and never been born into physical bodies. Evandar had instead built them this place, the Lands, as they called them, and fashioned them bodies of a sort, modeling everything after the elven race and the elven culture he loved so much. They were a beautiful people, with hair pale as moonlight or bright as the sun to set off their eyes, violet, gray, or gold, and the long delicate curled ears of that earthly race. For the most part, their skin was as pale as milk, just touched with roses in the cheek, but some had seen the human beings of the far southern isles, and those wore a rich, dark skin like fresh-plowed earth under a rain.
It was hard to say how many of them there were.