Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [100]
“He hadn’t. I did cut them off—well, we found Thavrae dead, you see.” The boy’s voice shook badly. “I did cut the thongs so I could get them free from—well, anyway, I did think Meer would be wanting them. But he said Thavrae were no brother of his and did throw them against the wall. When we were in the cell, I mean. So I guess the old man found them there.”
“I see. The old man could have kept them, then. Meer certainly didn’t want them.” Jill glanced round, but there was no sign of the jailor. “Though I don’t know, if any of these have real dweomers laid on them, he shouldn’t be carrying them about, for his own sake, like.” She began to look through the handful of charms and immediately spotted a pewter disk with a sigil she recognized.
Now that’s odd! Jill thought to herself. The Gel da’Thae dweomermasters would never use the same sigils and suchlike as we do, would they? But here’s the sigil of the Lord of the Fire of Air, plain as plain.
“Jahdo, do you have a talisman with this kind of picture on it?”
“I don’t. But I’ve seen one like it before.” All at once the boy’s eyes seemed to cloud over. “Somewhere. I don’t remember.”
Jill hesitated, wondering if she should test him for ensorcelment. then and there, but the ward was as usual full of people coming and going on their various errands.
“Well, it doesn’t matter.” With a deliberately casual gesture, because she wanted to spare Jahdo worry, she shoved the handful into her brigga pocket. “I might ask Meer later, if I remember it.”
What she did instead was go to Meer’s chamber, wake him up, and ask him there and then. Although just describing the sigil told him nothing, when he felt it with a fingertip he could form, or so he said, a good idea of its shape.
“I can tell you this,” he rumbled. “It’s naught that he received from his mother or from one of the priestesses of the Gel da’Thae. I’ve never come across this mark before, and as a loremaster, you leant a good bit about the sacred symbols. Beyond that, I have no idea of what it might be. As for the rest of these holy marks and symbols, ask me not, because those secrets, mazrak, I will not betray.”
“Very well, then. Well, my thanks, good bard, for what you’ve seen fit to tell me.”
Jill left him, then stood hesitating by the staircase, considering what she needed to do next. All at once she felt the touch of Dallandra’s mind on hers, a sign that the elven dweomermaster was back on the physical plane. When Jill went up to her chamber, she indeed found Dallandra there, sitting at her table and leafing through the book of elven chronicles that Jill had brought back from the Southern Isles.
“My gnome found you, then?” Jill said.
“He did.” Dallandra looked up with a smile. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Two days.”
Dallandra made a small irritated sound and shut the book.
“It seemed but a few moments to me.”
“Oh, I know. I’m not blaming you or suchlike.”
“I need to come back to this world, don’t I? I simply can’t keep traveling back and forth, trying to skip along the river of Time the way a child skips a rock on water. A delay like this could be a disaster if you needed me badly.”
“Just so, but what about your own work? What about Evandar’s people?”
“Well, I could stay here months, and it would be but a single day in his world, wouldn’t it?”
Jill laughed, in relief, not merriment.
“Of course. I’d quite forgot that the differences run both ways. I’m getting worried, Dalla. Alshandra’s already sent one pack of her worshipers here, trying to kill Carra and the child. Now that they’ve failed, she’s bound to raise another. She’s determined to get Elessario back.”
“So she is. Naught can make her understand the truth, Jill. She honestly believes that I’ve stolen her daughter, and that if she kills Elessario’s new body, then her daughter will be free of some sort of trap and come back to her.”
“In a way you have to pity her, but I keep thinking of those other women, the ones her dogs of war killed, and their men, too, dying trying to defend them.”
Dallandra shuddered.
“I do have to return to make my farewells