Storm Warning - Mercedes Lackey [141]
It had taken a long time, and when he emerged from it, he was too shaken by the experience to say anything. Ulrich did not seem in a hurry to make him speak, though; the Priest just sat there with him, pressing a cup of sweet tea on him, letting him take his own time in recovering.
But by the time An’desha felt ready to talk, Firesong came to tell Ulrich that the rest of the mages had already gathered.
“I should be there, too,” An’desha said, as steadily as he could, and felt a little glow of warmth at Firesong’s glance of approval.
He’s been trying for so long to get me to accept my powers and responsibilities ... I suppose this makes him feel very good. In spite of the soul-churning effect of wandering through the miasma of Falconsbane’s evil memories, An’desha realized that it made him feel rather good, too. Shouldering the burden—at least at the moment—was actually less onerous than anticipating and dreading the need to shoulder it. It made him feel the way he did when the Avatars had come to him—that tremulous exultation, the sense of being a tiny but bright light in a great expanse of darkness. He accepted what he must do.
He followed the others into the Council Chamber again, and waited with them while pages went around the room lighting the lanterns set into the plaster-ornamented walls. The Court Artist, who had apparently been sitting there and sketching some of the mages under pretense of recording a historical event, was sent packing out of the room by a scowl from Daren. Karal was there, sitting with the gryphons this time, bearing signs of windburn and chapped lips. His friend gave him a shaky smile. He seemed very disturbed by something, and somehow An’desha doubted that it had been the flying that had set that expression on his face.
Karal is brave, braver than I am. He wouldn’t be afraid of flying. Something else has frightened him.
“Let Karrral ssspeak forrr the thrrree of usss,” said Treyvan, when all the shuffling of papers and settling into seats was done. The great gryphon raised his head into the light, and his eyes glinted with reflections. “We have dissscusssed thisss, and he hasss the feelingsss of all three of usss.”
Karal cleared his throat self-consciously as all eyes turned toward him. “Well, what we basically discovered, is that there is a regular pattern to the disturbances, the ones that we saw, anyway. They are all the same size, the same distance apart, and in a straight line. We went as far as we could before turning back, and we didn’t see an end to them. Most of them are—transplants, I suppose you would say. They are circles of foreign soil; they look as if a gardener cut circles of land and replaced them with circles of land from somewhere else. Most of them were so similar to Valdemaran soil that if we hadn’t been looking for signs of disturbance we wouldn’t have spotted anything wrong. Some were from places I couldn’t recognize—the one nearest the city going directly north from the Palace is of black sand, for instance. There was one piece that I would swear was right out of a mountain meadow in Karse; it even contained an herb I know grows only there. I took samples from all of them. But one—there was one at the end that was different. That strange one—it was fused sand, like badly-made glass.” He swallowed, hard. “I—it would be very terrible if whatever did that has done it somewhere where there are people.”
“Did you see any of the strange animals some people have described?” Elspeth asked.
Karal shook his head. “No, nothing that didn’t seem quite normal, just out of place where we found it.”
“I found some of the strange animals, and even a bird,” Darkwind spoke up. “Or rather, Vree found them and caught them. I had the impression that the disturbances were not regular and not in a pattern, but it hadn’t occurred to me that many of them would simply look just like the land around them.”
An’desha listened with