The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [20]
‘My thanks. I’d like to get this settled before King Casyl goes off to the summer’s fighting.’
‘Oh, I’ve no doubt you can. The gossip tells me that he won’t ride north for another fortnight or so.’
‘Well and good, then. Ye gods! Another war in Cerrgonney!’
‘Now, now!’ Affyna paused for a sly smile. ‘The king never says war. It’s a rebellion, according to him.’
‘And when did the Boar clan swear fealty to the royal Wyvern?’ Nevyn said.
‘Oh, according to our present king’s father, it was round about 962 or so. Gwerbretion, he called their lords, and how could they be gwerbretion if they hadn’t sworn to him?’ Olnadd rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘We can’t doubt the king, can we now? He had it on the best authority—his own.’
They all shared a laugh but a grim one. In truth, Cerrgonney had been an independent kingdom for the past hundred and thirty-odd years, though kingdom was perhaps too grand a word for that rocky land filled with feuds, factions, and petty hatreds. The High King’s vassals, however, would support a war more readily if it were presented as putting down a rebellion rather than outright conquest.
‘And of course his scribes will write down what he tells them to,’ Affyna said, ‘and the royal bards sing the correct verses.’
‘Indeed,’ Nevyn said. ‘But ye gods, another war with the cursed Boars. I wonder if we’ll ever see the end of them?’
‘Now here!’ Olnadd gave him a grin. ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’
‘I can’t, alas. The dweomer tells a man what he needs to know and little else.’
That night Nevyn retired early to the small spare guest chamber to work an elaborate piece of dweomer. As much as false omens and pretentious glamours annoyed him, he knew that he’d need them. He’d worked too hard on the opal talisman to have the king accept it lightly, and if he simply gained an audience and handed it over, the king most likely would underestimate its importance. Many years before, Nevyn had successfully used a certain kind of magical trick to shorten a rebellion against the current king’s grandfather. Quite possibly he could use it to benefit the grandson as well.
Nevyn lay down on the bed, slowed his breathing, and visualized the sigils that would lead him out to the etheric plane. In his mind he saw the blue light gather; then suddenly it flooded the room. The walls, dead things, turned black, while the air and its spirits pulsed around him with a sapphire glow. To travel on this plane he would need his body of light, but he had worked this dweomer so often that it came to him almost automatically. He’d created from the etheric substance a body, solid blue against the flux, shaped like a man wearing brigga and a shirt, though lacking detail, and joined to his solar plexus by a silver cord. Nevyn transferred his consciousness into it and looked down at his physical body, lying inert and apparently asleep on the bed below. He rose up higher, slipped out of the house, and hovered in the air. Above him the stars gleamed, great silver whorls and streaks against the night sky.
Down below, flickering in the silvery-blue etheric light, the houses and streets of Dun Deverry spread out, black and sullen with stone and tile. Here and there a garden or a tree gleamed with a reddish vegetable aura. Here and there as well the bright ovoid auras of human beings and animals hurried through the streets or disappeared behind dead wooden doors. Yet in an odd way the city itself did seem alive. Its history was so long and so troubled that images from the astral plane had spilled over, as it were, into the etheric, so that Nevyn could see superimposed pictures from all its times of violence and hope.
The tangle of images formed a dense flood, rising and swelling—the streets shrinking, changing place, broadening, disappearing altogether; houses rising, aging, and falling;