The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [56]
He smiled at their tight, white faces and added lightly, "Try to remember that. It gives pause to harmful ambitions, I find."
Without waiting for a reply, the most feared wizard in all the Vale turned back to his circling mage-slayer. "I made you to destroy persons of my choosing. Let the rage you feel for what I have done to you goad you and guide you-as you slay the one whose image you now see."
Tharlorn waved his hand, and many golden eyes widened as one. Slavering jaws hissed in a rustling chorus, "Bodemmon Sarr!"
"Of course," the wizard replied, turning on his heel. He strode out of the room without another word or a backward glance.
The mage-slayer swung its heads to regard the two stock-still apprentices. The massed gaze of many glittering golden eyes, the two men found, carries a curious weight. Ere a few silent breaths had passed, they were both trembling.
Abruptly the serpent stiffened, turned its head with what might have been sneers twisting its many mouths, and slithered out of the chamber. It, too, did not look back.
Two faces that were pale with fear turned from fascinated contemplation of its undulating body to look at each other. Dry lips were licked, but neither of Tharlorn's surviving apprentices spoke.
In each other's eyes, each saw the same horror at Cathaleira's doom-and the grim knowledge that similar fates might not be far off for them.
The Lady of Jewels stretched long, shapely arms up over her head, swung them slowly down as her unbound hair stirred restlessly about her shoulders, and said to the men walking with her, "Ah, but it feels good to be saving the Vale with you three again!"
Craer merely grunted, but both Hawkril and Sarasper cast her looks and murmured variations to the effect of feeling the same way about her. Rested and restored, the Band of Four did feel at ease as they strolled along the winding farm lanes of upland Aglirta. They were in the poorest, most sparsely settled backcountry of what had once been the barony of Phelinndar-a land of many small farms, fenced with rocks and tangled gray giants of old tree stumps, where woodlots were many and their trees deep and dark, as if the Loaurimm was reluctant to draw back its fingers and let go its grip on the fallen barony.
Craer had almost decided to trust Embra again. She'd certainly seemed as bewildered as the rest when he'd found himself back with them in the Silent House again, after that bewilderingly short bout of running and slaying his way through Flowfoam against some outlaws bent on kingslaying-and she'd sworn up, down, and by every last oath of the Three that she'd cast no spell on him, and knew nothing about his sudden relocation. Craer knew the feel of Dwaer-magic by now, though… and if it hadn't been Embra using a Stone on him, who had it been? Hey?
Yet she'd offered to have Sarasper truth-tell her denials, and insisted almost to the point of tears that she'd had no hand in his sudden journey, and… and by the Three, Craer believed her. Which meant that someone with a Dwaer was watching over them.
Well, that shouldn't have been surprising news. After all, they were here, now, with the matter argued to a standstill and wearily set aside, to resume their hunt for Dwaerindim.
Embra had used her Stone to take them back to the clearing where she'd cast her seeking spell (a long time ago, it seemed). Now that place lay perhaps a day's journeying behind them. A small, swiftly banished prying spell that had nonetheless consumed an enchanted lamp of surpassing ugliness had told her that the Stone they sought now lay somewhere ahead of them, close by.
That lamp had been one of the few fragile items among the scores of enchanted oddities-old treasures from a grander, more magic-rich time-that now bulged in carrysacks and baldric pouches and even undergarment slings on each one of the Four. Though Embra's Dwaer-Stone was slung once more beneath her breast