Elvenborn (56 page)

"Worse things?" She wrinkled her brow. "What sorts of signs?"

"One of them came across signs that something had killed

and eaten several alicorns in the past week or so." He grimaced. "I would not care to encounter anything that could do that."

"And I suppose he didn't see it? Had no clue as to what it was?" If she knew what they needed to guard against, she could perform some specific magics—magic that would either re¬pulse the creatures or at least give warning of their presence. But without knowing what it was she was trying to ward off— she could waste her energy and skill shooing away spiders, only to have a giant slug descend on them.

"Nothing we've ever seen or heard of, my lady—the scout didn't get near; he said the place looked like an ambush in the making. From what he told me, the alicorns were torn in pieces, and I wouldn't even expect one of those dragons we've heard about to do that." She gave him a suspicious glance, but he didn't look as if he was exaggerating.

Well, that did fit in with what she'd been warned about this place. Kyndreth himself had been none-too-eager to go looking for purported Wizards in these hills, and had jumped to accept Kyrtian's offer to track them down. She'd probably lose some men in this. Now she was glad she'd bought them outright from Kyndreth instead of borrowing them. When an accident hap¬pened to a borrowed slave, it was amazing how the value of that slave suddenly increased....

"Do it," she ordered him. "Send the outriders ahead, find us a clear path so we can get around Aelmarkin and run along¬side Kyrtian. You're supposed to be Lord Kyndreth's best, aren't you?"

He bowed. "Yes, my lady," he said. No hesitation, no ex¬cuses, no objections. Just obedience. Exactly what she had paid for.

Well, not all that she had paid for. She'd also invested in ex¬cellence; so far, these slaves had been most satisfactory, but now they had better well prove that they could go beyond "satisfactory."

Or when she got back, she'd be having some words with Lord Kyndreth.

But right now, she had better keep her own mind on the job at hand. If these slaves couldn't rise to the challenge, she might

have to abandon them to their fate and narrow her goal to get¬ting her own self out intact.

They'd just paused long enough to pass around rations for lunch, eating in the saddle, before the afternoon downpour ar¬rived on schedule. By nightfall, they should be at Keman's cave-complex. As rain drummed on the hood of her cape and a few cold drops slipped around the collar and got down her neck, Shana was grateful that her "mount" was Keman, and not a real horse. She couldn't have fallen off if she'd wanted to, not even on the steep trails he was taking, and at the moment, she needed to be able to concentrate on holding the mental line of communication with Lorryn as tightly as possible. There was a lot of distance between them—and something unexpected had happened, something that made all the discomfort she felt com¬pletely irrelevant.

Caellach Gwain had vanished from the Citadel.

:... so when he didn 't turn up for breakfast, either, Hala thought it was more than odd,: Lorryn told her. :He's pulled sulks before, usually when he's managed to squirrel away food in his room, but missing three meals in a row was exceptional. The door was bolted from the inside; it wasn't hard to get it open, not with a half dozen Wizards working on it—but he wasn 't there when we opened it.:

Caellach Gwain gone! It was so tempting to allow herself to wallow in sheer relief, but—Caellach Gwain vanished out of his own room was a puzzle that only promised more trou¬ble.

She wiped rain from her face and closed her eyes, concen¬trating. :You don't suppose he's learned the transportation magic, do you?: she asked, apprehensively.

-.That's exactly what I'm afraid has happened,: was the grim reply.

Well, that made perfect sense. You didn't have to attend les¬sons to get the advantage of them. The miserable old toad could simply have sat in his room with a scrying glass and learned everything any of the other Old Whiners was learning.

:You've got a good reason, I'll bet.:

She felt Lorryn's nod. :His room was full of things from the old Citadel—a good many of them not his property, so many of the Old Ones tell me. By the way, that's put him beyond the pale, if that's any comfort to you. Even the Old Whiners who were his most vocal supporters were wild with rage when they found their property in his room. There's no way he could have known where some of those things were without going back in person, because there were a lot of small, valuable trinkets that were hidden away in drawers and chests he 'd never seen the in¬side of:

Her heart sank. :So he could be anywhere.: If he knew the transportation spell, all he had to do was be familiar with a place to go there. She supposed it was even possible to become that familiar using simple scrying.

:The old Citadel, some new hideaway of his own, even out spying on you,: Lorryn replied, and there was apprehension in his thoughts. :You know what would happen if people found out where you are right now, what you were doing, and who you were doing it with.:

Never mind that Lady Moth was clearly the Wizards' friend, that Lorryn's own mother and sister were fullbloods. This was different. This was consorting with the Great Lords' chosen general. She could try to explain until her face was blue, but if Caellach Gwain broke the news at an inopportune time, well—

:That's my worst fear, because there are some of the young¬sters who think that there was a second burst of transportation noise right after you and Keman left.: She sensed Lorryn's worry, and she more than agreed with it.

:Fire and Rain!: she swore angrily. :That would be just like him, wouldn 't it!: Even through her anger, she tried to think if she'd detected anything since she'd arrived. :He might be here. He might not. If he came in far enough from us, I wouldn't have heard the arrival. :

:Look, I'm going to do two things, and the first is that I'm go¬ing to turn his room into an iron cage,: Lorryn told her. :And when he tries to transport back in—he'll get a shock. Zed tried

it with a rock, and what happens is that you bounce back to where you came from.:

:With a demon of a headache, I can only hope,: she said sourly. :He'll try to go to another part of the Citadel, of course—:

-.Maybe, maybe not. Because the next thing I'm going to do is start planting iron wedges all over the Citadel except in desig¬nated 'magic rooms,' and those will be brand new ones that Fa¬ther Dragon is going to carve out for us.: He sounded—well, rather pleased with himself for coming up with a plan so quickly, and she didn't blame him.

:Zed can pour simple wedges for us easily enough, can't he?: she asked.

:With no problem at all; he's already pouring them, the chil¬dren are planting them, and Father Dragon has the first magic room carved out. I've been wanting to do this for a while, any¬way. It's one more defense against the Elvenlords, even if it is a nuisance for us to confine doing magic to those special rooms.: He sighed. :Still, it'll be worth it, and we can have the whole Citadel protected by tomorrow. Caellach Gwain will have no way of knowing where the safe rooms to transport to are or what they look like. So to get back here, he 'II have to apport to somewhere he knows.:

Her anger faded as she considered that. .7 don't think he's set foot outside the caves more than a dozen times since we ar¬rived. There can't be that many places where he can apport back.:

-.And I can have all of them watched by people we trust. That leaves only the old Citadel for him.: Lorryn sounded absolutely smug when he said that, and she didn't blame him.

:He can go live there and rot for all I care,: she said mali¬ciously. Maybe the Great Lords will decide that our fictitious Wizards live there. That would serve him right, if they find him sitting there like an old toad in a hole.:

.-Well, just keep alert for any sign of him, love,: Lorryn cau¬tioned. :He's a twisty old beast. I'm not sure I can think of every way he could think of to cause us harm.:

.7 will,: she promised, and gave him a wordless, loving farewell that she hoped remained untainted with her anger at Caellach Gwain.

"Well, that's not good," Keman muttered up at her, shaking the rain from his mane. He had, of course, been listening in.

"No, it's not. Should we tell Kyrtian?" She was of two minds on the subject. It wasn't as if Kyrtian didn't already have enough on his hands—and it wasn't as if his men weren't per¬fectly capable of catching one old man who was anything but woods-wise if he was spying on them.

Unless, of course, he was using the transportation spell to get him away each time it looked as if he was going to get caught.

But she hadn't heard the distinctive "noise" associated with that spell!

"I wouldn't," Keman replied after a moment. "It's not his business. It's wizard business. Let Lorryn take care of things at the Citadel; you and I will just have to be very vigilant from now on."

"I hope an ambush beast gets him," she grumbled.

Keman shook his head. "I wouldn't wish that fate even on Caellach Gwain. And you shouldn't, either."

"Well—maybe not an ambush beast. But I wouldn't mind seeing him treed by an alicorn," she relented.

"Nor would I, foster sister," Keman replied. "Maybe we'll have the privilege. And maybe he'll just get into trouble he can't get out of, all on his own, without our ill-wishing him. That would be best of all."

"I suppose it would," she sighed, and left it at that.

31

Dusk—and Shana looked up through the gloom and the drizzle at the mountain of rubble marking the site that Keman swore hid a major cave-complex.

Well, if it did, the original cave-mouth must have been big¬ger than anything Shana had ever imagined, much less seen. It looked from this perspective as if half the side of the moun¬tain had come down over the years, and it wasn't a small mountain. Steep, though; very steep, covered with trees and brush that clung to the slope with vegetative stubbornness, and probably kept the rest of the mountain from losing its outer skin.

The most recent fall had been quite recent indeed, and had added bulk to the pile on the left-hand side. There were trees, large trees, crushed under all that rock, with the remains of dead leaves still clinging to the branches.

Mage-lights hovered over the pile as Kyrtian's men looked on apprehensively. Keman—back to human-form—and Kyrt-ian climbed the rock-pile to the single opening that Keman had discovered near the top of the mound.

"Is he going to be safe?" one of the men asked dubiously, as Keman offered Kyrtian a hand-up over a tricky bit. Shana was dead-certain that he wasn't worried about Keman.

"Keman's a dragon," she reminded him. "They don't know rock, they live rock. Keman feels where each pebble is rubbing and might be loose. He'll know if something is going to slip be¬fore the rock knows."

"You'd better be right," Lynder muttered darkly. "I climb—I explore caves all the time—and I wouldn't go up there without spending weeks checking my path."

"You're not a dragon," she retorted, and turned her own at-

tention to the base of the pile. There, in a place where rock had been melted and reformed to stabilize the area (the indisputable mark of dragon stone-shaping), was where Keman had found the strange piece of metal. Shana examined the spot on her hands and knees with her own little mage-light, and in a few moments, there was no doubt in her mind that what he had found was not a random bit of something that might have been dropped by a curious Elvenlord long ago. There was more of the stuff under that original rock-fall. As she brought her pin¬point light in close to the ground, she saw a thin edge of some¬thing squashed along the boundary of rock-pile and dirt that didn't look anything like the fractured edge of a rock. What it did look like was another sheet of metal.

Just what was under that pile of rock?

Just what is inside this cave? That's what I should be asking....

She looked back up again. At that moment, Keman turned and waved back down at her. They must have found the en¬trance. A mage-light left the formation and swung purposefully towards the two figures up on the pile, then vanished, seem¬ingly into the rocks. There was some activity up there, as the two bent over something. A moment later, the first figure fol¬lowed the light into the tumbled rocks. Keman remained bent over while Kyrtian's men fidgeted restlessly, then eventually started back down the pile. Clearly Kyrtian had gone down in¬side the cave by rope, and Keman had remained just long enough to see that he was safely down.

"Now what's Kyrtian thinking?" the man beside Shana mur¬mured, fretfully. "We ought to be making camp, not climbing around in caves."

"Kyrtian's probably seeing if we can camp in the cave," one of his fellows pointed out. "It would be a lot drier, and we wouldn't have to worry about—Things."

"Unless, of course, those Things have been coming out of the cave," Shana warned, darkly. The more Kyrtian had explained what he hoped to find, the less she'd liked the idea of crawling around in there. So far, every sign had pointed to the conclusion that Kyrtian was right, and this was the site of his race's entry

into this world. What if that Great Portal hadn't quite been closed—or had been reopened? From what Lorryn had told her, Evelon was hellish at best; there was no telling what kind of horrors lived back there. The ambush beasts and the other weird things in this forest could be coming out of Evelon—or been sent by the Elvenlords' enemies, the ones they had fled here to escape.

Fire and Rain! If they were the losers in their fight, I don't want to meet what the Elvenlords we know thought was so bad they would risk running into an unknown world rather than face it or surrender to it.

Kyrtian's men didn't look very happy with her observa¬tion, so she didn't share any more of her thoughts. Fore¬warned was forearmed, but no point in making them too nervous.