The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [21]
Galerinos stood staring, his mouth half-open, his expression stunned.
“What did you do?” Rhodorix grabbed him by the shoulders. “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What—you have to know!”
“The curse never worked like that before! Back in the homeland, I mean.” Galerinos paused to gasp for breath. “You heard me. I asked the god to send ill-luck down upon them, and from the look of things, I’d say he did.”
Laughter sounded behind them, an odd laugh, more like the plucking of a cithara’s strings than a sound made by a throat. Rhodorix spun around. The strangest man he’d ever seen stood leaning against a tree trunk and smiling at them. A slender fellow, he had yellow hair as bright as the paint on a Rhwmani standard, and his lips were a paint pot red as well, while his eyes gleamed sky blue. His ears, however, were the strangest feature of all, long and furled like lily buds.
“I doubt if your god had anything to do with those bolts of fire,” the fellow said. “You know sorcery, don’t you?”
“What?” Gallo gaped at him like a dolt. “But that’s unclean!”
“Sorcery such as my friend Caswallinos studies is not unclean.” He pried himself off the tree trunk and walked over. “My name, by the by, is Evandar.”
Rhodorix dropped to his knees. “Forgive my brother, Mighty One,” he said. “He can’t kneel before you. He’s badly hurt.”
“So I see,” Evandar said to him, then turned back to Galerinos. “Your master, in fact, that very same Caswallinos, asked if I might find you for him. Come walk with me.”
Galerinos obeyed, striding uphill to join the being that everyone in the migration of the Devetii assumed was a god. Together they moved a few paces off. As Rhodorix got up to keep a watch downhill, he felt the air turn cool around him. He glanced up and saw a mist forming in the sky, a strange opalescent cloud shot through with pale lavender gleams and glints. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
“Ye gods!” Gerontos said abruptly. “They’re gone!”
Rhodorix spun around to look where his brother pointed. Sure enough, Evandar and Galerinos both had vanished. As he watched, the cloud of peculiar mist began to shrink into a swirl of gray and lavender. In a heartbeat, it had disappeared as well.Rhodorix tried to speak, then merely shook his head in bafflement.
“Do you think Gallo will bring us back some aid?” Gerontos said.
“I hope so,” Rhodorix said. “I’d think so.” Yet he felt that he lied. Why would the clan care about two shamed men such as themselves? Especially me, he thought, I’m the one who led us right into the trap.
With a curse and a groan of pain, Gerontos let himself slide down against the boulder until he sat upon the ground. Rhodorix sat down next to him and prayed that the gods would allow his clan to take mercy on his brother.
To Galerinos, it seemed as if he and Evandar had walked but a few feet away. The god, or so he thought of the being next to him, paused and turned to face him.
“Your master worried when you lads didn’t come back,” Evandar said. “He and some of the other men found that battlefield, if you can call it that. A slaughter yard, more like.”
“So it was,” Galerinos said. “I’m surprised that any of us got away.”
“They assumed you’d been taken prisoner, so I said I’d fetch you back.”
“You have my humble thanks.” Galerinos glanced around and saw nothing but mist all around them. “Where are