Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [21]
“Now that I can’t promise. I have other affairs on hand.”
With that he disappeared, so suddenly and completely gone that Jahdo was sure he’d dreamt the entire thing—until he realized that he could never fall asleep standing knee-deep in cold water. He filled the skins and rushed back to the bard, who was currying the white horse.
“Meer, Meer, the strangest thing just happened! I did see this man, and then he were gone, all at once like.”
“Indeed? Suppose you start at the beginning of this peculiar tale, lad, and tell it to me slowly.”
Jahdo did, paying particular attention to the fellow’s directions. For a long time Meer said nothing, merely laid his huge hands on the horse’s back as if for the comfort of the touch and stared sightlessly up at the sky.
“Well, now,” he rumbled at last. “I told your mother, didn’t I, that you were marked for a great destiny?”
“Well, you said maybe I was.”
“And I was right.” Meer ignored the qualification. “To have seen one of the gods is the greatest honor a man can have.”
“That were one of your gods?”
“It was. Did I not pray for guidance in our traveling? Did he not come to provide it?”
Jahdo shuddered. He felt as if snow had slipped from a roof down his back, and it took him a long time to be able to speak.
“You be sure that were a god? He didn’t look like much.”
“You ill-got little cub! It’s not for us to question how the gods choose to appear to us.”
“My apologies, then, but you be sure it weren’t one of those demons you do talk about?”
“Not if he gave his name as Evandar the Avenger, the archer of Rinbala, goddess of the sea, he whose silver arrows could pierce the moon itself and fetch it from the sky,”
“Well, he only said Evandar, not all the rest of that stuff.”
“The rest of that stuff, as you so inelegantly put it, happens to be two of his major attributes and one of his minor ones, as attested by the holy hymns themselves. Humph. I can see that I’d best attend to your education. Besides, if he’d been a demon, he’d have tried to snatch you away, to make me fail in my quest.”
Jahdo went cold again, a bone-touching chill worse than any god-induced awe.
“I smell fear,” Meer said.
“Well, do you blame me?”
“Of course not. Lead me over to our gear, lad, and open the big gray saddlebags. I’ve got some very powerful amulets in there, and a feather talisman wound and blessed by the high priestess herself, and I think me you’d best wear them from now on.”
They met on horseback and done at the boundary of their two domains, which lay far beyond the physical world in the peculiar reaches of the etheric plane. In this empire of images, a dead-brown moor stretched all round them to a horizon where a perennially setting sun fought through smoke, or so it seemed, to flood them with copper-colored light. Evandar rode unarmored, wearing only his tunic and leather trousers as he lounged on his golden stallion. Since he sat with one leg crooked round the saddle peak, a single shove of a fist or weapon would have knocked him to the ground, but he smiled as he considered his brother. Riding on a black, and glittering with black enameled armor as well, the brother was more than a little vulpine. Since he carried his black-plumed helmet under one arm, you could see his pointed ears tufted with red fur and the roach of red hair that ran from his forehead over his skull and down to the back of his neck. His beady black eyes glittered above a long, sharp nose.
“You’re a fool, Evandar,” the fox warrior snarled, “Coming here alone like this.”
“Am I now? Your message said you needed my help. Was it all a trap and ambuscade?”
He grunted, slung his helmet from a strap on the saddle, and began to pull off his gauntlets. Russet fur plumed on the backs of his hands, and each finger ended in a sharp black claw rather than a nail.
“First you lose your wife, your dear darling Alshandra,” he said at last. “And now I hear you’ve lost your daughter as well.”
“Alshandra’s gone, true enough, and good riddance to the howling harridan, say I! My daughter? Not lost