The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [131]
“I need to hunt,” Rori told Kov. “Do you have food?”
“A few bits of stale bread,” Kov said. “I might be able to catch a fish or two from this stream.”
“If I find a deer, there’ll be plenty of meat for both of us. See if you can find some firewood. I doubt me if you’ll want to eat it raw.”
Kov mugged sheer disgust and agreed.
With summer blooming on the hills, deer proved easy to find. Toward evening Rori spotted a herd, come out to graze on a grassy hillside. Hovering at the edge was a young stag. The herd’s prime stag would lower his antlers and run a few steps toward the intruder, who would back off, only to sneak back when the elder returned to his meal. Rori waited until the young stag had retreated some distance from the herd, then plunged down and struck. One quick nip at the back of the neck, and the rival stag hung limp and dead in his claws. The herd scattered, bounding off in all directions. He ignored them and carried his prey back to Kov and their improvised camp.
Kov had managed to scrape together enough wood to cook a few gobbets of venison on a pointed green stick. While they ate, he repeated the things he’d experienced since his kidnapping all over again, but in proper order this time.
“You’re telling me, then,” Rori said, “that these otter folk have dweomer.”
“Of a sort. Very much of a sort.”
“All this cursed dweomer!” Rori paused for a long snarl that made Kov rise to a kneel, ready to run. “My apologies!” Rori said. “It just aches my heart, all these strange things I can’t understand.”
“Mine, too.” Kov sat back down again. “The world was so much simpler when I thought dweomer only a folktale.”
On the morrow, Rori’s heart found more to ache over when they came in sight of Haen Marn. Years before, when in human form he’d seen the island, it had appeared to him as an ordinary-looking hillock of dirt and rock rising out of a lake of ordinary-looking water. With his dragon’s sight, he now saw the truth.
A huge vortex of astral force shimmered before him, a twisted, convoluted mass of glimmering silver-and-gold threads. At moments, the island appeared as he remembered it, but the image swiftly dissolved into the play of astral forces brought down and twined upon the physical plane. The entire construct glittered with strange blue lights and flashes of a pale purple unlike any natural color he’d ever seen, whether as a man or a dragon. Every now and then he heard sounds, too, a snatch of music once, a high-pitched whistling at other times. He understood only a little, not how it had been constructed but that it had been constructed, not why it was dangerous, but that it was extremely dangerous to such as him, a less than natural form.
Rori swung wide around the vortex and saw on the lakeshore a clump of shimmering gray lines forming the boulder with the silver horn. He called out to Kov to hold on tightly, then swooped down and landed near it. The dwarven envoy slid down from his back.
“There’s a silver horn on that rock,” Kov said.
“It’ll summon a boat that will take you to the island,” Rori said. “I think I’ll just stay here rather than fly over. Could you do me a favor?”
“But of course!”
“Tell the lady of the isle, Angmar her name is, that I’m here. She may want to come over and speak with me.”
The inhabitants of the island, however, had already seen them. Before Kov could even blow the summoning horn, the dragon boat set out from the pier to the sound of its brass gong, booming over the silent lake to frighten the water beasts away. Rori could discern Lon, still in charge of the rowers after all these years. His etheric-tinged sight told him something else, too, that only one of