The Spirit Stone. Katharine Kerr
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those tunnels.’
‘It’s highly unlikely, since they originate on the astral.’
‘An entire army of dweomermasters does strike me as a very distant prospect, now that you mention it. Here’s another odd thing. Neb told me that he feels some sort of link to our mazrak from an ill-defined past wyrd they seem to share. He couldn’t tell me much more than that. It’s not a pleasant link, however. That he does know.’
‘Oh by the Star Goddesses!’ Dallandra’s image looked abruptly weary. ‘I don’t know why I’m even surprised. Nevyn made a great many enemies during his long life.’
‘That’s certainly true. I remember a whole ugly clutch of them very clearly indeed, being as I was involved in hunting them down. Off in Bardek, that was, our little war with the dark dweomer –’ Salamander abruptly paused, his mind flooded by a surge of memories and omen-warnings both. ‘The black stone. The obsidian gem on Alshandra’s altar. It has something to do with all of this. I know it in my soul, but I can’t say why or what.’
‘Then meditate upon it.’ Dallandra’s thoughts rang with urgency. ‘Brood over it like a mare with a weak-legged foal.’
‘I shall. I’d wager high that this is a matter of wyrd, something ancient and deep. It involves me, too, though I’m not sure how.’
And indeed, Salamander was right enough about that. During his early childhood, when forming and keeping clear memories lay beyond him, the raven mazrak and the black pyramid had woven a net of wyrd around him. It had snared even a man as powerful as Nevyn, the Master of the Aethyr – which had been Neb’s name and dweomer title in the body he wore then, back in those far-off days.
Dun Deverry and The Westlands Spring, 983
Every light casts a shadow. The dweomer light has cast a darkness of darkness. In that vile night creep those who once were men even as you, thinking that they craved secrets only to ease the suffering of the world. Somewhere along their way, the shadow crept over them unawares …
The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
Built as it was across seven hills, the city of Dun Deverry towered above the surrounding farmlands. Riding up from the south, Nevyn saw it from a long distance away as a cluster of grey and green shapes on the horizon. The road twisted, swinging at times a mile off the straight as it meandered around a lord’s dun or rambled along a stream till it finally reached a ford or bridge where a traveller could cross. As the road changed direction, the city seemed to dance on the horizon, now to the east, then to the west, showing him different views as he drew closer. A little while before sunset he finally rode up the last hill, and by then, the city loomed over him like a thunder cloud. The south gates had been repaired since the last time Nevyn had seen them, over a hundred years before, when they’d been only ragged heaps of stone and broken planks. Now they stood twelve feet high and over twenty broad, made of stout oak banded with iron. Each band sported an elaborate engraved design of interlaced wyverns, and on the portion of wall directly above the gates stood a wyvern rampant, carved in pale marble.
Since the stone wall holding them was a good fifteen feet thick, the gates opened into a sort of tunnel, which eventually led onto a cobbled square. Oak saplings, dusted green with their first leaves, stood round the edges. Out in the centre a good many townsfolk were standing around the stone pool of a fountain, gossiping no doubt, but none of them paid any attention to Nevyn, a shabby old herbman leading a laden pack mule and a scruffy riding horse, all three of them covered with dust from the road.
Nevyn, however, studied the townsfolk. As he followed the twisting street uphill past rows of prosperous-looking shops, he kept looking around him, appraising the faces of the people he passed. He’d come to Dun Deverry on two errands. For one, he was searching for a particular young woman who had been his apprentice many a long year before. Everywhere he’d been in the years since her death, he’d searched but never found her. He was hoping that since she’d died in Dun Deverry, she’d been reborn there. She would look very different, of course, but he knew that he’d recognize Lilli when he saw her again. The other errand was far more complicated. To accomplish it, he’d need the help of friends.
Olnadd, priest of Wmm, the god of scribes, lived in a shabby little house not far from the west gate. A brown wooden palisade enclosed the thatch-roofed house, a vegetable garden, and a pair of white geese. When Nevyn arrived at the gate, the geese stopped hunting snails to glare at him. He laid a hand on the latch. Hissing and honking, the pair rushed forward with a great flapping of white wings. His horse and pack mule both threw up their heads and began pulling on reins and halter-rope. As soon as Nevyn let go of the gate, the geese subsided.
‘Olnadd,’ Nevyn called out. ‘Olnadd! Anyone here?’
The front door opened, and the priest hurried out, a slender man with a slick, sparse cap of grey hair. In daily life Wmm’s priests dressed much as other Deverry men did, in plain wool brigga with a linen shirt belted over them. Olnadd’s shirt sported yokes embroidered with pelicans, the sacred bird of his god.
‘Whist, whist,’ he called out, ‘get back!’
The geese retreated, but not far.
‘My apologies,’ Olnadd said. ‘They’re better than watchdogs, truly.’
‘So I see. You don’t look surprised to see me, so I take it that my letter reached you.’
‘It did.’ Olnadd opened the gate and stepped out, shutting it quickly behind him. ‘Let’s take your horse and mule around to the mews. I’ve got a shed out there that will do for a stable.’
Once his animals were unloaded and at their hay, Nevyn followed Olnadd into the house. The priest’s wife, a tall, rangy woman who wore her grey hair in braids round her head, greeted him with a smile and ushered them both into her kitchen. They sat at the table near a sunny window. Affyna brought out a plate of cakes and cups of boiled milk sweetened with honey.
‘So, then.’ Olnadd helped himself to a raisin cake. ‘What brings you to us?’
‘A rather curious business,’ Nevyn said. ‘I want to see the king. I’ve made him a talisman, you see, a little gift for the blood royal.’
‘Little gift?’ Affyna said. ‘If you’ve made it, it must positively reek of dweomer. Well, I suppose reek isn’t quite the word I mean.’
‘It will do, truly.’ Nevyn grinned at her. ‘The question now is, how do I get an audience with our liege to give it to him?’
‘That will take a bit of doing,’ Olnadd said. ‘I don’t suppose we should pry, but I can’t say I’d mind having a look at the thing.’
‘I shouldn’t admit this, but I wouldn’t mind showing it off. It’s taken me a cursed lot of hard work.’ Nevyn reached into his shirt, pulled out the slender chain he wore around his neck, and unfastened a small leather pouch. He slid out its contents, wrapped in layers of silk.
‘Close those shutters, will you?’
Olnadd got up and did so. One ray of light came through the crack and fell across the table in a line of gold. Nevyn drew a circle deosil around the bundle with his hand, visualized four tiny pentagrams at its cardinal points, and cleared the space around the talisman of all influences – not that evil or impure forces would be lying about the priest’s breakfast table, but Nevyn didn’t care to have the stone pick up traces of local gossip. He unwrapped the five pieces of silk: the first, mottled with olive, citrine, russet and black; the second, purple; the third, Wmm’s own orange; the fourth an emerald green, and the last pale lavender.
In the centre of the silks lay an opal, as big as a walnut, but so perfectly round, so smoothly polished, that it seemed to breathe and glow with a life of its own. Affyna