The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [153]
“I’ve been laying a trail to lead Nevyn right to the Old One’s villa. If we get there first, so much the better.”
“Yes, indeed,” Dargo said. “If the Old One’s dead or weakened. A cave’s a good place to lay an ambush, but not if you’re sharing it with an angry bear.”
So it was treachery, then. His wave of rage broke the Old One’s concentration and threw him clear of Baruma’s body. Once he transferred his consciousness back to his own, he snarled like the bear of Dargo’s figure of speech and dug his fingernails into the wooden arm of the chair. So. They thought they’d hang around like jackals at a hunt and pick up whatever spoils the lions left them, did they? They would be very surprised when they felt the power of the Clawed Ones unleashed upon them. The Old One decided that he would destroy them first; it was the easier job, after all, and one he could do through ritual.
For a long time that night he sat and brooded, while the room slowly darkened as the oil lamps burned down and the glittering zodiac above lost itself in shadows. At last, some hours before dawn, when the tide of Earth was running deep out on the astral, he roused himself and rang the gong. Once the slaveboy had fetched him a lantern, he hauled himself out of his chair with the boy’s help and made his slow way to his ritual chamber, but he dismissed the slave before he opened the hidden door into that black pit of a room. As he waddled in, a wave of scent, stale incense and long-dried blood, washed over him with comfortable familiarity.
As soon as he’d set the lantern down on the altar, he knew that something was wrong. He and his various students had worked so much magic in this room over the years, and so many human beings, to say nothing of animals, had died in it, that it normally had a malignant life of its own. Any person sensitive to such things would feel, walking in there, as if the very air quivered with the hope that he’d spill both blood and power. In a sense, the Old One’s workings had turned the entire room into a talisman, vibrating with and radiating back all his evil lusts. Yet that night he felt that it had gone dead, as lifeless and spent as any other broken talisman—a smashed crystal, say, or melted bronze disk. It was merely a black chamber with odd marks on the walls, filthy and smoke-stained, reeking of sour perfume and the memories of death—nothing more.
“Nevyn!” he snarled. “It has to be Nevyn!”
No Hawkmaster would have either the power or the knowledge to exorcise a ritual chamber at all, much less from some great distance. In fact, the Old One had absolutely no idea of how Nevyn could have done such a thing, and with good reason, since the job was impossible for any human or elf, even one of Nevyn’s power and learning. For a long time the Old One paced back and forth and swore with the pettiest foul oaths of the marketplace and gutter until at last, shaking and out of breath, he stood before the altar and stared up at the banner of the reversed pentagram on the wall behind it. In the flickering lantern light the star seemed to swell and glimmer. All at once the Old One was afraid; he felt power gathering around him of a kind that he had never invoked. In the central pentagon of the evil star a point of light gleamed, spread itself into a thin glowing mist, and as he watched in horrified fascination, images appeared in that mist.
They were persons of some sort, but nothing so earthly as human beings or elves or as otherworldly as pure spirits, presences rather that had form and shape but no true bodies. Since he was, after all, a master of magic in his twisted way, he knew that he was seeing only reflections or perhaps projections of these beings from some plane as far removed from the astral as the astral is from us, and that trying to communicate with them directly would be a waste of power and nothing more. At first he assumed that they must be beings of great evil, since they were