The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [150]
“I’m home,” he said aloud. “Well, in a manner of speaking. It can’t be more than a few hundred miles away.”
Now that he was free of Haen Marn’s water veil, he could scry again. As an experiment he brought out the black crystal and looked into it. He realized immediately that he was seeing through it to its white twin: in a greenish murk of lake water a dead log lay directly in the crystal’s narrow field of vision. Beyond it some large thing swam, indistinguishable in the clouded light.
“One of those beasts, no doubt,” Laz said to the crystal. “Well, your twin came with us, but it’s still well and truly lost. I can’t imagine anyone being willing to dive down and fetch it out.”
With a shudder at the thought of the lake beasts and their toothy mouths, he put the black crystal back in his sack. To scry for persons, especially those whom he knew well, the long grass waving in the wind would serve as an adequate focus.
The first person in his thoughts was Sidro. Her image came to him straightaway, standing outside a painted Westfolk tent and talking with Exalted Mother Grallezar. Both women looked excited and happy, laughing as they exchanged some sort of jest. Sidro must have left the forest on her own, he assumed, and sheltered among the Ancients with Grallezar and her refugees. As he watched, two blurry shapes, which he assumed belonged to Ancients, began to take the tent down. When he pulled back to see more of the area around Sidro, he realized that she was part of a small group who apparently had camped by a road.
What of the rest of his men? When he sent his mind out to Pir, he saw him walking through a herd of Westfolk horses in a very different encampment. Vek? He was in the same camp as Pir, spreading wet clothing to dry on tall grass. He scried out Faharn next, but rather than living among the Ancients, he and the remaining men had made a camp in open country—somewhere. Laz couldn’t recognize the place, an undistinguished stretch of grass, a stream that wound through boulders and straggly trees, and in the distance, some hills. It could have been anywhere in the Northlands. As he scried through the camp, Laz recognized nine of the men. The rest appeared only as the blurry aura-shapes of persons he’d never seen in the flesh.
Interesting, Laz thought. Faharn always envied Pir’s horse mage abilities. I wonder if that’s why they separated?
The strength of his scrying images gave him hope that he could still perform the one dweomer he truly craved: flight. He got up and stripped off his clothes, a clumsy job with so few fingers left to him. Just in case he managed to transform, he packed the clothes away in the sack and tied it shut as securely as he could with his maimed hands. He hopped up onto one of the rocks and stood naked. In the warm sunlight he breathed deeply, steadily.
When he pictured the raven in his mind, the form came to him, as strong and clear as ever. He imagined it standing outside of himself, prepared himself for an effort of will, and found himself inside the raven form before he could even say aloud the formulaic names. With a caw of triumph he hopped up and down and flapped his wings.
When he spread his wings, however, the feeling of triumph vanished. Dweomer had created his wing tips from his hands, and like his hands, the tips of his wings showed damage. What would those missing feathers do to his control? The raven existed, but could he fly? Only one way to find out—with a defiant caw Laz leaped into the air.
Flapping hard, he gained height, found a rising thermal, and soared. Success! At least at first—when he tried to land, the missing feathers blunted his wings and spoiled their perfect camber. He tumbled in the air, squawked, fluttered, and finally managed to glide back