The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [188]
Above the stars hung close, vast silver globes that echoed her body of light. The encampment far below blazed red and gold from the auras of the men inside it. On Honelg’s dun walls a gleam of auras rose from the archers on guard. The stone, the rocky hill, all the dead things in both dun and camp looked black, so black in fact that they seemed more like shapes cut out of the very fabric of life than objects with an existence of their own. All around them the grass, trees, and other vegetation shone a dim reddish brown.
Dallandra swept away from the camp and headed back along the road to the fortress of Bel. When it came into view, looming on its squat hill, she paused to study it. Here on the etheric plane, its stones loomed black and dead, but the timber of the actual temple inside the walls displayed a faint reddish light, like the last gleam of a sunset, indicating that the temple’s wood had been cut fairly recently. She saw no astral dome, no seals of blue light, nothing that would indicate the presence of dweomerworkers inside, whether they followed the light or cherished the darkness.
Cautiously, slowly, she drifted closer. She saw no one outside in the dun’s ward, not that she worried about the usual kind of sentries, those whose consciousness lay on the physical plane alone. She was expecting an etheric challenge, should a dark master be dwelling there, but no inverted pentagrams shone to ward away the dweomer of light. She wove herself a shield of bluish etheric substance, just in case a dark master should suddenly appear, clothed in lurid images of evil instead of a body of light.
Closer, closer—no one rose up to threaten her, yet it seemed she could sense—something. Arzosah had told her that above the temple itself the etheric forces seemed to be beating like a heart. Dallandra had no idea of what such an image might mean; etheric forces in her experience swirled, flowed, or occasionally spurted up and twisted like waterspouts, but she’d never seen any throb. Yet, as she drifted over the dun walls, she could see, high above the temple, an area, roughly circular, where the silver blue etheric light brightened, then dimmed, in a fairly regular rhythm.
She paused again, turning to scan all around her for enemies. Again, nothing. She rose higher until she hung in her flame-shaped body just below the pulsing circle, which proved to be the mouth of a tunnel stretching into a bluish-black darkness. Within the tunnel swirled images, strange geometric shapes, human faces, little twisted stars, deformed creatures, flowers and leaves and tendrils, all floating through an indigo haze. Someone had opened a gate to the lower astral plane and left it there, a trap and a danger to any etheric creature, such as the Wildfolk, who might drift into it.
Dallandra moved away from the tunnel mouth, then rose higher until she could look at it from above. Hanging below her, it appeared as a long tube, wide at the mouth, dwindling down and disappearing into a haze at the far distant end. The tube’s surface seemed velvet-soft or perhaps slightly furred, but utterly unnatural in any case. As she studied it, she realized that the far end of the construct was moving, twitching back and forth like the tailtip of an impatient cat. The motion would account for the pulses of etheric force.
But what was it? It was much too complex for a simple astral gate. Her first instinct was to retreat, to return to her body and consult with Salamander and Valandario, but the astral gate was a potentially fatal hazard to the weak creatures whose world it had invaded. Within her cloak of fire she raised the images of her hands and called upon the Light, the pure Light that shines behind all gods, the Light that the dark dweomer hates above all else. She dedicated the working with its name.
All around