The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [111]
On his second day there, Nevyn turned onto a street leading to the docks and noticed a stout fellow walking ahead of him – a successful merchant, judging by the brightly checked wool of his brigga and the heavy embroidery on his fine linen shirt. At a tavern door the fellow turned in, pausing to glance back. Nevyn received the impression of a typical Cerrmor man, with a broad face, blue eyes, and thick pale hair, but the impression was all he got, because the fellow blanched, ducked, and practically leapt into the tavern. Nevyn glanced behind him and saw no one on the street. It must have been me who frightened him, Nevyn thought. I wonder who he is? He hurried over to the tavern door, but when he looked in, he found no sign of the fellow except the swinging of the back door, as if someone had rushed out and flung it closed behind him.
Nevyn trotted through the tavern and out the back, but he saw only empty ale barrels and a dungheap in the narrow alley. With a shrug he went on his way, but for the rest of his time in Cerrmor, he kept on guard in hopes of seeing the mysterious merchant again. He never did, and no more could he place the fellow among the crowded memories of his unnaturally prolonged life. Once he even remembered Tirro, the shifty-eyed little wastrel of a merchant’s son, but he never equated the two—which was a great pity, because many years later, that sight of a grown, prosperous, and utterly corrupt Tirro, or Alastyr to give him his full name, would have stood him in good stead.
Eventually his search for those souls to whom he owed debts of wyrd made Nevyn forget about the mysteriously frightened stranger. After wandering the kingdom for some years in the hopes of finding Lilli and Morwen reborn, he returned to Eldidd and the small town of Cannobaen. He decided he’d stay there, too, until the Lords of Wyrd sent him an omen that indicated otherwise. Not even such a powerful dweomermaster as he could realize, however, just how right his choice was, nor could he know that hundreds of years later he would be reborn on the western border at a time when its folk would stand in the gravest peril they had ever faced.
PART II
The Westlands 1159
The spiral, not the circle, is the key to the fulfilment of Wyrd.
The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
In a pair of old man’s hands, the black stone glittered. They sat inside a tent, and soft voices talked incomprehensibly as Evan—he knew his real name was Evan—stared into the stone. In the black glow a man with daffodil-yellow hair and cherry-red lips held out a white flat thing with a picture of a black lizard upon it. Or was it a raven?
Salamander woke suddenly with the dream vivid in his mind. He sat up on the bed and ran his hands through his sweaty hair while he stared at the braided rushes covering the floor. He reminded himself that he was sitting in a chamber in the Red Wolf dun, not in a Westfolk tent. After a few good yawns, he rose and went to the window. Down below in the ward servant lasses were carrying baskets from the cookhouse into the great hall. On the far side of the ward he could see grooms leading horses to the watering trough. The dun had woken for the day.
Salamander dressed, ready to go down for breakfast, but he lingered in the chamber, thinking over the dream, trying to dissect its residue. The obsidian pyramid was calling to him. He could understand it no other way than that the stone was trying to reach him. He sat down on the bed and considered the stripe of sunlight while he let his mind reach out to the stone.
In vision he saw the obsidian pyramid standing upon an altar beside an oil lamp. The pyramid glowed with its strange black light—a spirit, he suddenly realized, was indwelling the gem. Nothing else would explain the glow and the bright black sparks that occasionally flashed from its surface. What sort of spirit? With the Sight as his only tool the answer lay beyond him. He widened the vision. He could clearly discern the