The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [116]
At this firm dismissal, Laz bowed and left. In the empty corridor he paused to make a small dweomer light. The silver glow bobbed along ahead of him as he returned to his chamber. There he found Faharn asleep, wrapped tightly in a blanket on his mattress near the door.
Laz considered immediately writing out the translation of the letters, but the room lacked a table, and with his maimed hands, grinding and mixing ink would be difficult. He would wake at dawn, he decided, when he usually did, and get Faharn up to help him. He laid the dispatch case down by his saddlebags, dismissed the dweomer light, then sat on the wide windowsill to consider the night view. The camp below stood mostly dark, but here and there a faint glow indicated a dying campfire. Now and then someone walked through, a twitch of motion in the gloom far below. Stars glittered on the distant river.
Lord Tren had sat here on summer nights, now and then, to take the air and brood over his cursed life. Laz pretended to be Tren once more, consciously tried to recapture his feeling that life was bleak and full of betrayals. If only—that was the key, Laz decided. If only I, Tren, lord of this miserable demesne, could—do what? He couldn’t remember what it was that Tren thought he wanted. Probably Tren had never been sure of it himself. Sorcery seemed as good a guess as any, whether or not the lord had ever used the word “dweomer” to himself.
The hair on the back of Laz’s neck suddenly rose. Someone, something, had entered the room behind him. He wanted to twist around and leap to his feet in order to confront the intruder, but since he was perching on the edge of a long straight drop down to a cobbled ward, he turned and stood up slowly with great care. The spirit who had entered waited for him to face her. At first glance she appeared to be a pale, blue-haired woman, barefoot and wearing a blue dress, but when he looked more carefully, Laz realized that an etheric ectoplasm made up the dress and her body both, with the color the only difference between them. She glowed in the dark room like a ray of moonlight falling through an arrow slit in a wall. When he gestured out the sigil of the Kings of Aethyr in the air, she smiled and nodded.
“Will you save the dragon book?” She spoke in Deverrian.
“I’ll try, certainly,” Laz said in the same. “Will you help me?”
“I shall tell those who guard it who you are. They cannot speak, but they can hear. The man with the beast on his face has the book.”
With that, she vanished. Laz shuddered, suddenly cold, but pleased nonetheless. He would have help in this impossible-seeming task. This realization brought another, that the spirit called Evandar must have commanded immense power, if the fate of one of his artifacts could still trouble the Lords of Aethyr long after his death. Their concern had to be great if they’d send a messenger down the planes to a renegade dweomerman like himself. Suddenly, using the book as bait to hook Sidro looked like a less than prudent idea.
I’d best think of somewhat else, Laz told himself. Tomorrow, though. After a long day in the saddle, plus dealing with both royalty and astral spirits, he felt exhausted. Faharn had spread his blankets out on the narrow bed. Laz took off his boots and lay down fully-dressed on the lumpy mattress. I’ll never get to sleep on this!
But suddenly he was awake, and the room full of sunlight. He sat up, yawning, just as Faharn came bustling in with a basket of bread and a pitcher of water for their breakfast.
With Faharn’s help, Laz wrote out a translation of the two Horsekin letters on the sheets of pabrus Salamander had given him. He had enough blank space left over to add a few notes concerning Cerr Cawnen’s role in Horsekin history.
“Come to think of it,” Faharn said, “that’s where the Alshan drites’ supposed Holy Martyr Raena died. They probably want to build one of their cursed shrines in it.”
“You are quite right,” Laz