The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [164]
It occurred to Laz that it had been a long time since anyone had welcomed him to a place that felt like home. For a moment, he felt close to tears, but he managed to smile and thank her in a steady voice.
After a tankard of Haen Marn’s dark ale, Laz felt tired enough to excuse himself and go upstairs to his old chamber. The straw mattress and the blankets still lay where he’d left them, and the basket of extra clothes stood waiting for him as well. Outside, the sun lingered above the horizon, a sign that he had flown far to the north indeed. Its warm golden light filled the tiny chamber with the peace of an approaching night.
Laz set his sack down and knelt beside it. He took out the precious dragon book and propped it up against the base of the wall. He could just discern the harsh lavender glimmer of a spirit dancing on the cover.
“Please don’t leave again,” he said aloud. “The Westfolk mages and the dragon himself will come here to fetch you.”
The spirit brightened as if agreeing, then withdrew. Laz got up and went to the window. He leaned on the sill to look out at the lake, rippling in an evening wind, and used the sunlight upon the ripples as a focus to scry for Dallandra. Although he lacked the knowledge to send her messages, he wondered what she might be doing at that moment.
What he saw surprised him. Rather than out on the grass or in a tent, she was sitting inside a room and nursing an infant that he took for Dari. He could just dimly discern that she sat in a cushioned chair, and that two other women sat nearby, though neither of them was Sidro or any other women he’d seen among the Westfolk. Although he tried to sharpen the vision, it refused to clarify. In a fit of exhausted frustration, he broke it.
That he’d seen anything at all through the water veil around Haen Marn intrigued him. Some force must have been guiding him or lending him strength—the astral spirits of the book, perhaps. Yet the scrying left him uneasy. Something dangerous lurked close to Dallandra. That he knew; the what or why of it escaped him.
Ever since he’d met Dallandra and Ebañy, Laz had come to see just how inadequate his own dweomer training had been. Hazdrubal had left out a good many things, such as the ability to send thoughts to a fellow dweomerworker’s mind. He had given Laz a good understanding of the principles of the dweomer, but he’d slighted the practice in a good many areas, always while promising that someday, soon but never on the morrow, he would teach more. If I hadn’t been so gifted, Laz thought, I’d not have gotten very far with the work. Faharn was right about the old man. He was something of a fraud, truly.
Be that as it may, Hazdrubal had certainly paid twice over for any sins he might have committed. Laz had a vivid memory of Alshandra’s faithful holding up their bloodstained hands in the sunlight and shrieking with joy after they had clawed and hacked the Bardekian to pieces—gore under their fingernails, blood oozing down their wrists as they held up gobbets of flesh—Laz banished the image and shuddered.
But the gifts—that evening, watching the sun sinking over the hills around Haen Marn, Laz wondered about his gifts, everything Lord Tren had so longed for but lacked. Someone had given them back to him. That he could surmise, especially when he remembered Hazdrubal’s scornful words about the Great Ones, who “meddled,” or so his teacher had called it, with the destiny of those who chose the dweomer road. But then, Hazdrubal had walked on the dark paths. Once again, Faharn had been right.
The dark paths. Had he himself known them? Once, in that other life Dallandra had mentioned but never revealed? Laz felt so sick that he could barely stand. He staggered back to the mattress and dropped to his knees upon it. Was that what had cost Lord Tren the only thing he’d ever truly loved?
“No,” Laz whispered in the Gel da’Thae tongue. “By all the gods, not that!”
Yet he suddenly felt eyes watching him. He looked around, saw no one, twisted this way and that, still saw not even a spirit in the chamber,