A Time of Exile (58 page)

Pecl
(Dev.) Far, distant.

Rhan
(Dev.) A political unit of land; thus, gwerbretrhyn, tierynrhyn, the area under the control of a given gwerbret or tieryn. The size of the various rhans (Dev.
rhannau)
varies widely, depending on the vagaries of inheritance and the fortunes of war rather than some legal definition.

Scrying
The art of seeing distant people and places by magic.

Sigil
An abstract magical figure, usually representing either a particular spirit or a particular kind of energy or power. These figures, which look a lot like geometrical scribbles, are derived by various rules from secret magical diagrams.

Thought-form
An image or three-dimensional form that has been fashioned out of either etheric or astral substance, usually by the action of a trained mind. If enough trained minds work together to build the same thought-form, it will exist independently for a period of time based on the amount of energy put into it. (Putting energy into such a form is known as
ensouling
the thought-form.) Manifestations of gods or saints are usually thought-forms picked up by the highly intuitive, such as children or those with a touch of second sight. It is also possible for many untrained minds acting together to make fuzzy, ill-defined thought-forms that can be picked up the same way, such as UFOs and sightings of the Devil.

Tieryn
(Dev.) An intermediate rank of the noble-born, below a gwerbret but above an ordinary lord (Dev.
arcloedd). Wyrd
(trans, of Dev.
tingedd)
Fate, destiny; the inescapable problems carried over from a sentient being’s last incarnation.

A SPECIAL PREVIEW OF
A TIME OF
OMENS

BY
KATHARINE KERR

The winds of change are blowing through Deverry, and in every epoch the omens of those changes are undeniably vivid to those who can recognize them. In one era, a battle of dark dweomer is brewing, while signs from the shadowy lands of the Guardians herald unprecedented change. In an earlier time, for the near-immortal wizard Nevyn, they speak of struggles yet to occur, of a dead king and the coming of his long foretold successor. With the Wyrd of a land in the balance, Nevyn, long awaiting such omens, finds them suddenly upon him in ways even he could not have foreseen….

A
ll winter Nevyn had been wondering when the king in Cerrmor would die, but he didn’t get the news until that very day, just before the spring equinox. It had rained over Dun Drwloc, dissolving the last of the snow and leaving pools of brown mud in its stead. When the sky started clearing in earnest, the old man climbed to the ramparts and looked out over the slate gray lake, choppy in the chill wind. He was troubled, wondering why he’d received no news from Cerrmor in five months. With those who followed the dark dweomer keeping a watch on the dun, he’d been afraid to contact other dweomermasters through the fire in case they were overheard, but now he was considering taking the risk. All the omens indicated that the time was ripe for King Glyn’s Wyrd to come upon him.

Yet, as he stood there debating, he got his news in a way that he had never expected. Down below in the ward there was a whooping and a clatter that broke his concentration. He turned on the rampart and looked down to see Maryn galloping in the gates at the head of his squad. The prince was holding something shiny in his right hand and waving it about as he pulled his horse to a halt.

“Page! Go find Nevyn right now!”

“I’m up here, lad!” Nevyn called back. “I’ll come down.”

“Don’t! I’ll come up. It’ll be private that way.”

Maryn dismounted, tossed his reins to a page, and raced for the ladder. Over the winter he had grown two inches; his voice had deepened as well, so that more and more he looked the perfect figure of the king to be, blond and handsome with a far-seeing look in his gray eyes. Yet he was still lad enough to shove whatever he was holding into his shirt and scramble up the ladder to the ramparts. Nevyn could tell from the haunted look in his eyes that something had disturbed him.

“What’s all this, my liege?”

“We found somewhat, Nevyn, the silver daggers and me, I mean. We went down the east-running road. It was about three miles from here that we found them.”

“Found who?”

“The corpses. They’d all been slain by the sword. There were three dead horses but only two men in the road, but we found the third man out in a field, like he’d tried to run away before they killed him.”

With a grunt of near physical pain, Nevyn leaned back against the cold stone wall.

“How long ago were they killed?”

“Oh, a ghastly long time.” Maryn looked half-sick at the memory. “Maddyn says it was probably a couple of months. They froze first, he said, and then thawed probably just last week. The ravens have been working on them. It was truly grim. And all their gear was pulled apart and strewn around, like someone had been searching through it.”

“Oh, no doubt they were. Could you tell anything about these poor wretches?”

“They were Cerrmor men. Here.” Maryn reached into his shirt and pulled out a tarnished message tube. “This was empty when we found it, but look at the device.”

Nevyn turned the tube and found a strip graved with three tiny ships.

“You could still see the paint on one shield, too,” Maryn went on. “It was the ship blazon. I wish we had the messages that were in that tube.”

“So do I, your highness, but I think me I know what they said. We’d best go down and collect the entire troop. No doubt we’re months too late, but I won’t rest easy until we have a look round for the murderers.”

As they hurried back to the broch, it occurred to Nevyn that he no longer had to worry about communicating with his allies by dweomer. It was obvious that their enemies already knew everything they needed.

Even though Maddyn considered hunting the murderers a waste of time, and he knew that every other man in the troop was dreading camping out in the chilly damp, no one so much as suggested arguing with Nevyn’s scheme. If anyone had, Maddyn himself would have been the one to do it, because he was a bard of sorts, with a bard’s freedom to speak on any matter at all, as well as being second in command of this troop of mercenaries newly become the prince’s guard. The true commander, Caradoc, was too afraid of Nevyn to say one wrong word to the old man. Carrying what provisions the dun could spare, the silver daggers, with Maryn and the old man riding at the head of the line, clattered out the gates just at noon.

“At least the blasted clouds have all blown away,” Caradoc said with a sigh. “I had a chance for a word with the king’s chief huntsman, by the by. He says that there’s an old hunting lodge about ten, twelve miles to the northeast, right on the river. If we can find it, it might still have a roof of sorts.”

“If we’re riding that way to begin with.”

They found the murdered men and their horses where they’d left them, and it ached Maddyn’s heart to think how close they’d been to safety when their Wyrd fell upon them. While servants looked for a place where the thawing ground was good and soft, Nevyn coursed back and forth examining everything—the dead men, the horses, the soggy ground around them.

“You and the men certainly trampled all over everything, Maddo,” he grumbled.

“Well, we looked for footprints and tracks and suchlike. If they’d left a trail we would have found it, but you’ve got to remember that the ground was frozen hard when this happened.”

“True enough. Where’s the third lad, the one who almost got away?”

Maddyn took him across the field to the sprawled and puffing corpse. In the warming day the smell was loathsome enough to make the bard keep his distance, but Nevyn knelt right down next to the thing and began to examine the ground as carefully as if he were looking for
a precious jewel. Finally he stood up and walked away with one last disgusted shake of his head.

“Find anything?”

“Naught. I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get, to tell you the truth. It just seems that …” Nevyn let his words trail away and stood there slack-mouthed for a moment. “I want to wash my hands off, and I see a stream over there.”

Maddyn went with him while he knelt down and scrubbed his hands in the rivulet. All at once the old man went tense, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack again, his head tilted a little as if he listened to a distant voice. Only then did Maddyn notice that the streamlet brimmed with glassy blue undines, rising up in crests and wavelets. In their midst, and yet somehow beyond them, like a man coming through a doorway from some other place, was a presence. Maddyn could barely see it, a vast silvery shimmer that seemed to partake of both water and air like some preternatural fog, forming itself into shapes that might not even have existed beyond his desire to see it as a shape. Then it was gone, and Maddyn shuddered once with a toss of his head.

“Geese walking on your grave?” Nevyn said mildly.

    In his role as a learned man Nevyn recited a few suitable lines of Dawntime poetry over the corpses, then the silver daggers mounted up and left the servants to get on with the burying. Maddyn spurred his horse up next to the old man’s and mentioned the decrepit hunting lodge.

“It’ll be better shelter than none, truly,” Nevyn said.

“You don’t suppose our enemies camped there, do you?”

“They might have once, but they’re long gone by now. Tell the men we won’t be out hunting wild geese long, Maddo. I just want one last look around, that’s all.”

Only then was Maddyn sure that he had indeed seen some exalted personage in the stream.

At sunset they reached the lodge, a wooden round-house, its thatch half-gone, standing along with a stable behind a broken-down palisade. As soon as they rode within five hundred yards of the place the horses turned nervous, tossing their heads and blowing, dancing a little in the muddy road. Maddyn had the feeling that they would have bolted if they hadn’t been tired from their long ride.

“Oho!” Nevyn said. “My liege, you wait here with
Caradoc and most of the men. Maddyn, you, Owaen, and Branoic come with me.”

“You’d better take more men than that. Councillor,” Maryn said.

“I won’t need a small army, my liege. Most like there’s naught left here but bad memories, anyway.”

“But the horses—”

“See things men don’t see, but men know things that horses don’t know. And with that riddle, you’ll have to rest content.”

Nevyn was right enough, although the ‘bad memory’ turned out to be bad indeed. The men dismounted and walked to the lodge, and as soon as they stepped through the gap they saw and smelled what had been spooking the animals. Nailed to the inside of the palisade was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and mutilated—the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be—from the fragment left—its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the shelter of the palisade to vomit.

For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half-sick now, his face dead white and looking with all its wrinkles more like old parchment than ever. He ran his tongue over dry lips and spoke at last.

“A would-be deserter, most like, or a traitor of some sort. They left him that way so he’d roam as a haunt forever. All right, lads, get back to the troop. I think they’ll all agree that we don’t truly want to camp here tonight, shelter or not.”

“I should think not, by the asses of the gods!” Owaen turned to Maddyn. “I know the horses are tired, but we’d best put a couple of miles between ourselves and this place if there’s a haunt about.”

“You’re going to, certainly,” Nevyn broke in. “I’m going to stay here.”

“Not alone you aren’t,” Maddyn snapped.

“I don’t need guards with swords. I’m not in danger. If I can’t handle one haunt, what kind of sorcerer am I?”

“What about this poor bastard?” Owaen jerked his thumb at the corpse. “We should give him some kind of burial.”

“Oh, I’ll tend to that, too.” Nevyn started walking for
the gate. “I’ll just get my horse, and then you all go on your way. Come fetch me first thing in the morning.”

Somewhat later, when they were all making camp downriver, it occurred to Maddyn that Nevyn seemed to know an awful lot about these mysterious people who had left that ugly bit of sacrilege on the palisade. Although he was normally a curious man, he decided that he could live without asking him to explain.

    Nevyn brought his horse inside the tumble-down lodge, tied him on a loose rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddlebags near the hearth, where there lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomermaster behind this plot—or so he assumed, anyway. As assumptions went, it was a solid one. After he confirmed that the chimney was clear, he piled up some logs and lit them with a wave of his hand. Once the fire had blazed up enough to illumine the room, he searched it thoroughly, even poking at the rotting walls with the point of his table dagger. His patience paid off when under a pile of leaves that had drifted in through a window he found a pewter disk about the size of a thumbnail, of the kind sewn on saddlebags and other horse gear as decorations. Stamped into it was the head of a boar.

“I wonder,” he said aloud. “The Boar clan’s territory lies a long way from here, but still, if they thought the journey worth it for some purpose … Are they in league with the dark dweomer then?”

The idea made him shudder. He slipped the disk into his brigga Docket, then considered what he was going to do about the possible haunt. First, of course, he had to discover if indeed that poor soul whose body rotted outside was still hanging about the site of his death. He laid more wood on the fire, then gathered up a mucky little pile of the damp and mildewed thatch that had slid from the roof over the years. If he needed it, the stuff would poduce dense smoke. Then he sat down in front of the earth, let himself relax, and waited.