Fire Dragon - Katharine Kerr [89]
“Oh do stop! I hate it when you talk like that.”
“My apologies.” He got up and busied himself with putting the chair back under her little table. “I don't mean to trouble your heart.”
Rhodry turned, made her a sweeping bow, and strode out of the chamber. For a long time Dallandra sat looking at the closed door and wondering if she dared search for more omens. The dweomer-cold had warned her that Rhodry's Wyrd still waited, unfulfilled. In the end she decided against scrying further. Wyrd always fell where it would, and there was naught that she or any other dweomermaster could do about it.
The Wildfolk eventually found Evandar on Lina-lantava, the Isle of Regret, but by then they'd forgotten why Dallandra had sent them. He could assume that she wanted to see him. They danced around him in a circle and pointed at the sky with stabs of their warty fingers, their usual way of asking him to follow them. The most intelligent of the pack, a big purplish gnome with scabby wens all over his face, tugged at the edge of Evandar's green tunic as if it were trying to pull him along.
“Tell her you found me,” Evandar said. “But I can't leave just now. I'll come soon.”
The gnome grabbed his tunic with both hands, this time, and tugged so hard Evandar nearly stumbled.
“Is she in danger?”
The gnome looked up, frowning, and shook its head.
“Is anyone else in danger?”
Again the no.
“Then I'll come when I've finished my business here. Now be gone!”
With a sour and reproachful look, it faded away.
Evandar had just arrived on the island, or, to be precise, on the mountaintop that housed the exiled remnants of the Collegium of Sages, formerly of Rinbaladelan. All round him the wind moaned, unfolding long scarves of dust and wrapping them around stunted trees. In the middle of a stretch of pale coarse grass stood a scatter of wooden buildings. Every inch of them—walls, lintels, doors, shutters—bore words in the elven syllabary, embellished with little birds and animals, all engraved deeply into the wood and then rubbed with red and blue pigments to make them legible. These texts and the similar ones on the interior walls held a volume's worth of history, the story of the fall of Rinbaladelan, placed there so that even the very walls would share in the grief. From one of the distant buildings drifted the sound of chanting in young voices, as a group of pupils recited some lesson in unison with the wind sighing in the grass.
Evandar walked over to the longest of the buildings, but before he could knock, Meranaldar opened the door to him. A tall man and a little too thin, he had stooped shoulders and soft hands stained with black ink. Normally his face showed so little emotion that he seemed perpetually wistful, but today he was grinning, his large violet eyes snapping with delight.
“Come in, come in! Your map is finished! Or did you know that?”
“No, not really, but something did prompt me to visit you.” Evandar smiled in return. “Let's have a look at it.”
Inside the library, rows of wooden cabinets lined the walls and stood rather randomly in the middle of the room. They housed crumbling relics of the Great Library of Rinbaladelan, books snatched from the death of the city by the armload and thrown into the escaping boats. The smell of mildew hung thick, despite the low fires smouldering in two tiled hearths to dry the air. In an adjoining room stood open shelves filled with the copies that centuries of scribes had made of these treasures.
Close to the hearth stood a long narrow table and upon it, a thick papyrus scroll. Meranaldar untied the blue riband and spread the map out with a flourish. In black and red lay the plan of the city that had been the first earthly thing Evandar had ever loved. For a long time he stared at it without speaking, remembering the rose gardens and the fountains, the marble stairways leading down to the sea, the great observatory where elven sages studied the fixed stars and the wanderers moving through