Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (97 page)

He spent a further fast minute in hurried study before
snapping back into his body.  As always, the sensation, so like his mother
jerking him hard by the collar when he had been about mischief, unbalanced him
momentarily.

“I think we’re in trouble,” he murmured to Kineta to
keep his voice from carrying deeper into the hollow.

She remained standing with arms crossed, nose
wrinkling in response to Marik’s statement.  “Deeper than the hole we’ve
already dug our way into?  I’d like to hear what makes you think that.”

Marik explained, the story washing over Sloan with no
visible effect while Kineta tucked her thumbs into her belt and looked
increasingly put out with every word.  To her credit, she refrained from
indulging in a satisfying barrage of cursing.  She frowned at her boots and
considered.

Colbey shifted on a rock across from Marik, making him
notice the scout for the first time.  He must have wandered over while he’d
been drifting.  Kineta cocked her head in Colbey’s direction, asking, “What do
you know about them?”

“If they are there,” Colbey replied with a cold look
at Marik, “then I know nothing of them.  You instructed me to scout the forest
ahead, as you recall.”

“We told you to find us a way out of this trap!  With
an army sitting atop our escape route, I don’t see a clear path!”

“Our path is set,” Colbey replied.  Affronted anger
tinged his voice.  “Moving north without detection will not be difficult.  The
Stoneseams will hide us, as they do now.  Careful movement from one concealment
to the next is all that is required.  I can keep you from their notice.”

“By his account,” Kineta retorted with a gesture at
Marik, “this is hardly a simply scouting party blundering through the trees!  A
whole copping army!”  She swiveled to face Sloan.  “And a force that size after
us alone?  I don’t like the smell of it.”

“It is questionable,” Sloan agreed.  “We don’t know
how many black soldiers were truly at the outpost, so we can’t judge whether
five-hundred men is a significant percentage or simply an expendable pursuit
force.”

“Five-hundred men after a half-squad makes no tactical
sense.  What else is going on here?”

Marik, hoping she would not overreact, suggested,
“Maybe what happened in Tullainia?”  Kineta and Sloan focused on him.  “These
people set Tullainia on its ear, by all accounts.”

“We still don’t know why,” Kineta reminded him.  “Were
they hoping to conquer bloody Tullainia, or destroy it?”

“I don’t think it matters,” Marik said, emboldened by
the sergeant’s reaction, even if still slightly hostile.  “It’s the same
result, isn’t it?”

Sloan mused, “If so, then our pursuit might not have
been a chase as much as their forces deploying across southern Galemar from the
pass.  Their planned troop movements might have simply swept us before them
like flotsam on the tide.”

Kineta retaliated forcefully.  “Do not ever say that
again!  This isn’t the bloody Nolier War all over!”

“No, it is not,” Sloan agreed.  “This is something
else entirely.”

The other sergeant glared at that.  She began
muttering, wondering how they should proceed.  Marik felt a tap on his foot and
found Dietrik glancing upward.

His gaze held unspoken words Marik clearly read. 
Dietrik’s feelings were plain.  Marik still felt conflicted.  He had not
reached a decision yet and wanted time to sort through it all.

Kineta noticed the two men in silent communication and
demanded, “What do you two think you know?”

Marik jumped slightly, unable to prevent a guilty
expression from gracing his features.  “Oh, well…it’s nothing.”

With dagger eyes, Kineta pressed, “Out with it!”

“I’m not sure if it’s even useful, that’s all.  But…” 
He explained in quick order, passing it off as inconsequential that the court
enclave had happened to send him a mirror to communicate with.

Sergeant Kineta grew thoughtful rather than angry, as
Marik had feared.  “As I understand, you say that you can use this mirror to
see what you need to, like…like looking through a window at the street
outside?”

“In a way, but it’s complicated.”

“Show me the lieutenant and the other half of the
squad.”  She stepped closer to Marik.

“See, that’s what I mean.  I can’t scrye anything I
feel like.  It’s a difficult piece of work in the first place.”

Her irritation returned full force.  “I am aware you
are only half a mage, but have you ever tried?”

“Yes, actually I have.”

The sergeant’s anger grew.  “If magic users can actually
see whatever they want, then why in the lowest hell didn’t the court’s mages
warn us about these beast-monsters!  They ravaged all of Tullainia before they
crossed the mountains, and you mages thought it wasn’t important information?”

Fraser, Marik reflected bitterly, would have called
down anyone shouting at one of his men like that.  Sloan stood watching,
neither interested nor disinterested.

Marik measured his words carefully.  “Scrying is not
so simple, sergeant.  If it were, then no kingdom’s armies would ever be able
to gain the upper hand, right?”  Kineta’s spine stiffened, her outrage still
burning hotly.  Pressing on, Marik continued by saying, “I’m not very good at
it, but I’ve studied how scrying works.  The strongest mage who ever lived can’t
scrye at random.  I need an object…connected to whatever I wanted to see, to be
able to scrye it.”

“What in the ninth hell is that supposed to mean?” 
Her cold tone was only matched by the icy glare from Colbey, though the scout
also seemed faintly curious at the same time.  “Say it plain so us ‘common
serfs’ can figure it out!”

A low, angry ember sparked in Marik, a pallid glow
beside Kineta’s raging frustrations.  It was enough to make his response curt. 
He had never wanted to be anything except a swordsman and hated his mage gift
as much as Kineta did being squeezed in this vice.  “In order to scrye…meaning
to call someone’s or something’s image in the mirror…I need a catalyst
connected to my target that can be used to teach the mirror what I am looking
for.  It’s like rubbing a scent under a bloodhound’s nose so he understands
what you want him to track.  If I wanted to see the commander, I’d need a lock
of his hair to connect the mirror to him.  Without a catalyst, it’s only good
for shaving in the morning.”  The sergeant still glared, so Marik added with
emphasis, “I can’t go poking around in the king’s bed chamber to watch him and
the queen make the next heir-royal just because I felt bored!”

“So you say,” Kineta shot back.  “And you have this
woman’s scalp tucked away behind your belt, have you?”

“She only sent me the mirror.”

“Then by your own explanations, this
mirror talking
is not a viable option.  Stop wasting our time with this nonsense!”

“This,” Marik asserted by stepping off his boulder to
face her, angry at the accusation, “is not a simple matter!  She sent me this
particular mirror because I wouldn’t
need
her hair or blood to produce
the affinity the working requires!  She says this mirror has been used to link
with her own before, and that makes it naturally
want
to find hers first
before all else!  The way water will flow through a dried streambed when the
winter snows start melting, rather than cutting a brand new channel.”

“Let’s say I buy into this,” Kineta supposed.  “As a
practical question, what good would it do us?”  She glanced at Sloan.  “We are
here.  They are there.  Thoenar is a long piss further off than the outpost, or
the nearest division.  I hardly need to hear one of Raymond’s pet witches tell
me it’s either shit or go blind!”

“We don’t know what she might say,” Sloan spoke up,
“unless we talk to her.  We can’t move until nightfall at the earliest, and the
men need to rest.”  He redirected his attention to Marik.  “Play around with
it, but come dark we’re moving unless you have a good reason not to.  The
longer the invaders hold what land they’ve taken, the less our chances of
passing through unnoticed.”

Sergeant Kineta clearly wallowed in a quandary.  She
was uncertain what she should do.  Sloan had pointed out that they still had
time left to them though, and she left to find an unclaimed rock to rest on
while she stewed.

Colbey, never one who apparently needed rest, departed
to continue scouting the enemies.  He had never accepted Marik’s assertions on
enemy positions at face value before.  It was reassuring to see him acting his
usual self.

Dietrik withdrew the wrapped mirror from his pack and
handed it over to Marik before returning to his blade.  Marik carried the
mirror to the hollow’s furthest corner where the light shone dimmest and the
rock falls provided a substantial pile that could shield him from view by his
fellow Kings.

Celerity had sent this to him under the assumption
that he was well versed in scrying workings.  No instructions had she written
for how to contact her mirror with this one.  She assumed he would know, though
why she held such confidence in his knowledge after his obvious lapses in her
presence mystified him.

It should be simple, if Natalie’s diary contained all
the information he hoped he would need.  Too bad she had not written the book
for teaching purposes, else she surely would have gone into greater detail
regarding knowledge she already knew well enough not to set down in record.

He needed, or believed he needed, to send out the
seeker without tying it to a specific intention.  That should make the working
easier, being able to skip that step.  It made him nervous.  If he erred, he
might contaminate the prevailing affinity in the mirror, and then never contact
Celerity.  Not that he especially
wanted
to talk to her.

Also, there was the small matter of his never having
scryed in quite this fashion.  He had simply sought his father.  Never had he
built a link between mirrors for the purpose of two-way communication.  The one
time he’d seen Tollaf do it, he had known nothing of scrying, so understood
little of what the old man did.

Yet the matter had come to the sergeants’ attentions,
and Dietrik’s own worry would ease.  He owed his friend that much.  Friends
looked after each other in whatever ways they could, and there was nobody he
would more readily entrust his life to.  Dietrik had already gone far beyond
the extra mile for him when he’d been little better than an incinerated corpse.

Perhaps he might be able to direct the conversation
toward his father, though no doubt Celerity would be asking most of the
questions.  The magician, Tru, might have shaken that red stranger from
whatever tree he’d taken to.

Marik unwrapped the cloths.  The small, polished
surface reflected his image faintly in the gloom.  Would his aura or personal
life energies running through his arm interfere with the etheric ring?  To be
safe, he propped the mirror against a massive slab that had broken free from
the upper mountain wall centuries before.

After shuffling away on his rear several feet, he
opened his channels.  The mass diffusion from the Rovasii was thicker than
anywhere Marik had seen it.

Under normal circumstances, completely filling his
inner reserves would easily use all the ambient diffusion floating in the hollow. 
The thick mists, nearly a heavy fog, quickly swelled his reserves with better
than half the purple illumination remaining within the mountain pocket.

He expelled his doubts, clearing his mind to leave the
highly sensitive scrying working undirected.  When he began setting the energy
around the mirror’s rim, he stopped and cast it aside.  It might not matter but
the rope he squeezed onto the frame had been thick as his arm.  The larger
mirrors at Tollaf’s and Celerity’s had demanded it.  Would it overwhelm this
smaller version?

Marik didn’t know, and he cursed Tollaf.  A
true
master would have taught his apprentice all he knew to supplement the
fragmented information in the diary.  If he was not a skilled scryer, the old
man had no one to blame but himself!

He started over, using a finer gauge strand to
impregnate the mirror with etheric power.  It was the same size as the ring he
had imbued on Ilona’s hand mirror, but at that time he had known the seeking
serpent would only need to reach to the edge of the city.  Would a smaller ring
this time have the power to reach across Galemar?  Well, if this failed to
provide enough energy for the working to use, it might also be too little to
disrupt the mirror’s inherent affinity with Celerity’s.

Go.  Just…go.  Seek out the mirror you’ve connected to
before.  This
, he risked forming an
image from memory, an image of the round mirror in Celerity’s workroom.  He
prayed that was also the mirror she used regularly. 
You remember this,
don’t you?  Go find it!

The serpent shot from the mirror, to his great
relief.  It would never have formed if there were no clear target to seek. 
With the mirror being so small, the etheric serpent appeared to be rising
straight from the round glass rather than the frame’s top.

It faded after ten feet, as usual.  Marik saw it must
be uncoiling straight through the mountain wall, streaking north as if it were
a compass needle enslaved to one true direction. 
That’s hopeful.  Maybe
it’s actually working.