The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [12]
Up in the heart of the hill country, right under the looming pine-black mountains, lay one particular estate that had been bought and built some seventy years earlier by a retired civil servant named Tondalo. Although it received rents from some freeborn cattle ranchers, its own slaves raised enough food and linen and so on for it to be fairly self-sufficient. Only rarely did any of its slaves turn up at the market down in Ganjalo, the local town; even more rarely did visitors come to its gates. Since the few neighbors were too busy working their own land to pry into its affairs, everyone assumed that the third generation of Tondalo’s heirs were running the estate. They would have been shocked to learn that the old man himself was still alive, though by no means in good health.
In truth, of course, Tondalo could have no heirs, because he was a eunuch, castrated as a boy to deny him a family and thus limit his interests to Vardeth’s civil service. Since he had a brilliant mind for detail, he’d risen high and taken an active hand in the politics of his town, becoming rich enough to buy first his freedom, then an impressive house in the city, and finally this lonely estate. Now, at a hundred and sixty-odd years old (he really couldn’t remember just when he’d been born), he lived in necessary seclusion. Not only had he grown so grossly fat (a hated legacy of his castration rather than any natural result of a love for pleasure and good eating) that travel was nearly impossible for him, but he needed privacy for his work. He had immersed himself so long and so thoroughly in the craft of the dark dweomer that he was as much of a leader as their chaos-sworn brotherhood could have. To his fellow practitioners of the dark arts, he no longer had any name at all. He was simply the Old One.
Of course, most times he had no need to travel. Scrying in a basin of black ink kept him in touch with the other members of the Dark Council and also brought him direct visions of the doings of his various allies and minions throughout Surtinna. Every now and then a messenger arrived, bearing books and the necessary supplies for his various workings. (The messengers never left again, of course, at least not alive.) When the full council met, it did so in an image-temple out on the astral plane, not somewhere in the hills or cities of Bardek. Yet on occasion he sincerely wished that he could travel on important errands instead of having to trust the younger students of the dark arts to run them for him. By its very nature, studying dark dweomer tends to make a man untrustworthy in the extreme.
Such a case was this matter of Rhodry Maelwaedd. If he’d been capable of it, the Old One would have gone to Deverry himself to supervise this crucial kidnapping and the disposition of its victim. As it was, since he’d had to entrust the job to a disciple on the one hand and hired assassins on the other, now he fretted constantly, wondering if the job had been done right. He couldn’t simply scry them out to see, because all the important actions had happened either in Deverry itself or on another island, and not even the greatest dweomer minds in the world could scry across large bodies of open water. The exhalations of elemental force, particularly over the ocean proper, quite simply obscured the images like a fog. If he had tried to travel across them in the body of light, the waves and poundings of this same force would have broken up his astral form and led to his death.
So he could only sit in his villa and wait and brood. What particularly worried him was the complexity of the plan. If nothing else, he’d learned from his days in government that the more complex any project was, the more likely it was to fail, and this one had as many twists and turns as a bit of Deverry interlace. If he’d had a couple of years to spend, he would have thought and meditated until he’d honed some scheme as sharp and simple as a sword blade, but time had been short and the threat too