The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [164]
“How will you scry?” Evandar said.
“Into the mists.” Arzosah lay down on the ledge and tucked her front paws under her chest. “That’s the dragonish way. Tell me of this brother and his madness.”
While Evandar talked, Arzosah stared into the steaming mist below her. Shapes formed, mere illusions of the sort that anyone can see in clouds, then drifted into nothingness. In her mind she began to picture this Ebañy, began to see his wife as well and the children, playing among the tents of their travelling show. She saw in her mind Bardek, green with spring, and the white cities on their seacliffs. In the mists other images began to appear, fragments only and short-lived, until at last the scrying took her over.
“I see the ocean,” Arzosah began. “The ocean pounding on great rocks beneath a high slender tower. Night is falling. I see the tower again, and lo! a fire is burning at the top of the tower. Down below lies a dun, and beyond that, a little town.”
“Cannobaen!” Evandar whispered. “Go on.”
“Strange ships are sailing into the harbor, ships with prows carved into the shape of dragons. On the deck stands a blond man with a child in his arms, a wild child with brown hair that’s all matted and curly.”
“Salamander and his son Zandro. Go on.”
“There is naught more but mist.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying.” Arzosah swung her head his way and hissed. “That’s all I can see.”
“Well, it’s enough,” Evandar said. “Strange things, indeed, and things of great moment. To Cannobaen in ships in the elven fashion, is it? Strange and twice strange.”
Abruptly he was gone. She had no perception of his vanishing; he simply ceased to be there.
“Good riddance!” Arzosah muttered. “The gall of him! Faithless and nasty, are we?”
She tipped back her head and roared out a dweomer command in the secret language of wyrmkind. Her answer came as a rumble and a hiss and spew of steam. Again she roared out the spell-word, and this time the mountain answered with a leap of fire deep in its heart. All round the peak, the land trembled in fear.
“I’ve looked everywhere,” Marka said. “I can’t find him.”
“I saw him just a little while ago,” Keeta said. “He was walking toward Vinto’s tent.”
“He’s not there now. I’ve already asked Vinto.”
“Ye gods. He could have gone anywhere.”
The two women were standing at the edge of the public caravanserai on the outskirts of Myleton and watching the men bustle about, setting up camp. The acrobats were hauling on the ropes to raise the tents; the dancers were leading the animals to water. When she glanced around for her children, Marka saw them beginning to unload bedrolls and cushions from the wagons.
“Are the children safe, doing that?” Keeta said.
“Kwinto’s watching them,” Marka said. “He hasn’t seen his father since we pulled in, he told me.”
“He could have gone into the city to buy a permit.”
“Maybe. But something’s wrong. I can just feel it. Come with me, will you?”
“Of course. Let’s take the Myleton road. We’ve got a couple of hours till sunset.”
Side by side they walked down the archon’s smoothpaved road. The winter rains had turned Bardek green, and on either side of the road, set back behind low stone walls fields of hay bowed and rippled in the warm wind. In the ditches twixt wall and road wildflowers bloomed in scented tangles, red poppies, white alyssum, dark violets. It was in a ditch that they found their first hint of the trouble ahead: one of Ebañy’s sandals, lying among the flowers. Keeta picked it up and inspected it.
“It’s his, all right. Well, he can’t have gone far, limping along on one shoe.”
The second sandal, turned up about a hundred paces on, lying right out in the road.