Darkspell (48 page)

With the sphere created, Nevyn could bring his mind back to the normal world. He was shocked to find that the warband had traveled a good three miles; working dweomer on horseback was even harder than he’d expected. For the next hour or so, he merely rested, until they were about three miles from the farm. He went briefly back into his trance, called up the light, and let it stream back into the waiting sphere, but he cast a new wrap of darkness over Jill, Rhodry, and himself. Now he could only hope that
Alastyr had the common sense to keep a scrying watch. If he had, he would see that sphere, blazoned with the sigils of the light, riding straight for his hiding place. Nevyn wanted him to panic, and to panic thoroughly.

“Jill, Rhodry,” he whispered. “Now!”

They slowed their horses to match his pace, tagging after the warband for a few hundred yards until there was a good distance between them and the unsuspecting gwerbret. With a quick wave of his hand Nevyn led his two silver daggers off the road at a trot. They turned down a side lane that led to the farm by a narrow but more direct route than the road, galloped into a stand of birches, then made their hidden way through the trees. By the time Blaen noticed they were gone, they would be well ahead of the warband.

At length, when they came to a little stream running in a valley between two hills, Nevyn pulled his tiny warband to a halt.

“Very well, silver daggers. The farm lies just on the other side of this hill. Here are your orders. I’m going to lie down and go into a deep trance. You two tie up the horses, then stand guard over my body. It’s just possible that Alastyr will send his apprentice out to try to kill me.”

“He’ll never get past my sword,” Rhodry said.

“No doubt—but if I lose this battle, we’ll meet someday in the Otherlands.” He turned to Jill. “If I die, child, pray with all your heart and soul to the Light that lies behind the moon, and don’t you tell me that you don’t know what I mean.”

Jill caught her breath with a gasp, but even though his heart ached for her, Nevyn had no more time for words. He spread his cloak on the ground, lay on his back upon it, and folded his arms over his chest, positioning each hand on the opposite shoulder. First he invoked the Lords of Light, then lay quietly, gathering strength. Nearby Jill and Rhodry stood with drawn swords. As he closed his eyes, he wondered if he’d ever see them again.

Slowly and carefully within his mind, Nevyn summoned his body of light, a pale-blue simulacrum of his
own form, but stripped down to the essentials and joined to his solar plexus by a silver cord. When Nevyn transferred his consciousness over to this form, he felt as if the physical body were dropping sharply away. For the briefest of moments he felt nauseated; then he heard a sound, a click like a sword striking a shield, and he was looking out of the simulacrum’s eyes. His physical body lay below him in a world filled with the blue light of the etheric plane. Since he’d withdrawn from it, his own body looked like a lump of dead flesh and nothing more, but he could see Jill and Rhodry as two egg-shaped whorls of flame, their auras pulsing round them. The trees and the grass glowed dull red with vegetable-life force.

Nevyn rose about ten feet above his body, the silver cord paying out behind him like a fisherman’s line, and looked round. The stream that flowed through the valley might well be useful, he decided, because crossing running water in the body of light is dangerous in the extreme. In the blue light the stream ran silver, and above it drifted its elemental current, visible as a troubled, shifting wall of smoky stuff, a snare if only he could get his weasel into it. He rose higher and drifted toward the crest of the hill. It was time to throw his challenge.

Down on the other side of the hill was a grassy meadow, and in it lay the farmstead, a crumbling roundhouse behind an earthen wall, some sheds, a few fruit trees so old that their life glow was more a brown than a red. Nevyn smiled to himself; the seals were down. Alastyr must have scried out the warband and let them fall in panic. All at once he saw a man run out of the house and head toward a shed with his arms full of saddlebags. He decided that he’d best keep his enemies too busy to think of killing Camdel.

Out of the glowing blue light Nevyn fashioned a spear shape with his mind, then threw it hard for the running man’s dark-shot aura. When it struck, the fellow dropped the saddlebags and screamed aloud. Although his physical body would feel no pain, his trained mind must have felt it
searing like a hot iron. With the swoop of a striking falcon, Nevyn flew over the farmhouse as the man ran back inside.

“Alastyr!”
he called out in a long exhalation of thought.
“Alastyr, I’ve come for you!”

He heard an answering howl echo through the blue light. Like a snake striking up from the ground, Alastyr rushed to meet him. His simulacrum was a huge, black-robed figure, hung with rich jewels and woven with sigils. The silver cord was wrapped thrice about his waist like a kirtle and hung with severed heads. The face that peered through the hood was pale and cruel, the eyes a glitter of dark in a white ghost. Nevyn called upon the Light and felt his own body of light pulse and glow with its power. In answer Alastyr swelled up and blackened as if he would suck up every light in the universe and put it out. The battle was joined: to see who could break up the other’s body of light and drive the soul within, naked and helpless, into the power of the greater forces behind each warrior.

Nevyn struck first with a wave of light that made Alastyr bob and float like a bit of jetsam on the sea. He thrust again, sending his enemy swooping up, but as he followed, he felt Alastyr’s own forces working on him—a decay, as if a thousand claws pulled at him and tried to tear him apart. Much of his will was diverted to keeping his simulacrum together, pulling down more and more light and building it up as fast as Alastyr could rend it. The rest of his power went for attack, a rain of golden arrows and long spears that drove Alastyr this way and that as Nevyn circled round, edging, pressing him with light that beat against the darkness and shrank it back.

His whole strategy was to force Alastyr out of the blue light and into the first sphere of the Inner Lands proper, where he would have mightier forces to command. As yet Alastyr was too strong. The dark eyes within the hood burned and raged. Nevyn kept hammering him, striking with spears of light, while Alastyr sent out wave after wave of darkness to claw and bite him in return. When Nevyn struck hard enough to tear some of the pompous sigils off the black robe, Alastyr howled like an animal and pulled
back. Nevyn risked trying to build a gate behind him, using part of his will to pin the dark enemy and part to open a path to the Inner Lands. Too soon—Alastyr slipped away and sent out a flood of darkness like a wild sea.

For a moment Nevyn plunged and fell. He felt his simulacrum loosening around him like a slipped cloak and desperately called upon the Light. All he could do was struggle to heal himself and fend off the worst of Alastyr’s blows as the dark enemy pressed in closer and closer. Like boulders of palpable darkness the blows hit home. All at once Nevyn saw the water veil over the stream coming closer, too close! He wrenched around and flew up fast, dodging past before a startled Alastyr could react. Yet he’d barely repaired his shattered body of light when the enemy was after him with a darkness like a spew of poison.

Straight into his face Nevyn hurled a wall of light that tore and dissolved the severed heads on his kirtle, yet he could feel himself weakening as the enemy pressed ever on, the darkness pouring from twisted hands. All at once Alastyr screamed, the thought-sound echoing in the blue light, and swooped this way and that like a swallow coursing a field for gnats. Below him his silver cord lay dangled, broken. Someone had killed his physical body, and Nevyn could only assume that it was Jill or even Blaen.

But there was no time to indulge his shock at this unexpected aid. Alastyr’s simulacrum was breaking up, revealing the pale-blue etheric double underneath. While the dark master fought against the inevitable decay, Nevyn built up a gate to the Inner Lands, two pillars, one black, one white, with an indigo void between them. As soon as they held steady, he sent a blast of light that shoved Alastyr through, then rushed after. Although he’d lost the first battle, the enemy was far from crushed, and Nevyn knew it.

Nevyn threw himself through the gate after the fleeing dark master, both of them rushing, gliding, falling down the path, blown like scraps of parchment on a livid indigo wind, while all around them were voices, laughter and screaming and torn scraps of words blown past them on the
indigo flood, and images—faces, beasts, stars—swirling and beating against them like a flock of manic birds. Nevyn threw waves of light ahead of him, pounding Alastyr, stabbing him over and over until the last of the black robe tore away and whirled past, torn with rents that opened into the void. The wind blew them onward, rushed them, threw them headlong at last into a glow of violet light, where a river flowed far beneath, tenuous, shifting water of a kind that no stream on earth has ever known and no man ever tasted. A silence here, the wind gone, and around stretched fields of flowers, or the shapes of flowers, moon-gossamer things, white and deathly.

Shaken, Alastyr’s etheric double swooped and fluttered, desperately trying now for escape, not victory. The Moon Land where they fought is the gate to many others, Nevyn’s own Green Land, the Orange of the world of form, the shining home of the Great Ones; here, too, abuts the proper sphere of the dark dweomer, the Dark of Darkness, the Land of Husks and Rinds. If Alastyr could escape to the dark, his soul would live on, working harm for aeons to come. Nevyn could see him trying to open a gate, his hands fluttering, the words of the rite pouring, gibbering from his mouth. Nevyn sent a spear of light that slapped and flung him high just as the first pillar formed, then shattered the half-made gate.

Howling, Alastyr tried to flee, but Nevyn swooped up and rained down fiery light to trap him. With one hand Nevyn flung spear after spear and pinned Alastyr in a cage of light, while the etheric double threw itself against the shining bars and bit them in panic. With his enemy pinned Nevyn built up another gate, this one with the golden pillars of the sun, and between them opened the pure blue of a summer sky.

“Not mine the judgment!” Nevyn called out. “But yours!”

Through the pillars sped an enormous shifting, shimmering arrow of light, flying straight and true, striking Alastyr so hard that the double shattered into a thousand pitiful shreds. There was a shriek, then the whimpering of
a tiny child. For the briefest of moments Nevyn saw the child, flickering like a candle flame, a mewling babe with Alastyr’s raging eyes. Then the light swelled, enveloped the tiny form, and swept it through the portal and up the path to the Hall of Light, where it would be judged.

“It is over!” Nevyn cried out. “It is finished!”

Three great knocks, three claps of thunder, boomed through the violet light, while down below the death-white flowers nodded. Nevyn knelt and bowed his head, not in worship, but as a sign of fealty, then let the portals fade away. In his exhaustion he felt the silver cord tugging on him, pulling him back to his body, which lay at a great distance but no true distance at all.

Sarcyn pulled his dagger free of Alastyr’s heart and wiped it clean on his dead master’s face.

“Vengeance! And honey sweet it is.”

He rose and ran into the kitchen just in time to see the farmhand bolting out the back door. Sarcyn let him go; there was no time to waste chasing someone who knew so little about them. Whimpering under his breath, Camdel lay in the straw by the hearth. When Sarcyn knelt beside him, he shrank away from the knife.

“I’m not going to kill you, little one,” Sarcyn said, sheathing it. “I’m going to unchain you. We’ve got to ride fast.”

When Camdel moaned aloud, Sarcyn hesitated, caught by a feeling that he couldn’t quite understand. His pet lordling was going to have a miserable life ahead of him, no matter how much sexual pleasure he took in his master’s torments.

“Ah, horseshit!” Sarcyn said abruptly. “You’re going to see your cursed father again, after all.”

Cursing himself as a fool for succumbing to the first feeling of pity that he’d felt in years, Sarcyn got up and grabbed the leather bag that held Alastyr’s books.

“Fare you well, my fine, noble lord,” he said.

Camdel let two thin trails of tears slip down his cheeks in an agony of relief. Sarcyn ran out of the room and into
the farmyard, where his horse was waiting, saddled and ready.

“Gan! Curse you! Where are you?”

Silence for an answer. Sarcyn turned, glancing round the farmyard. No one there. Apparently the old man had seen a chance at freedom and taken it. No time to worry about him now, Sarcyn thought. His horse stamped with a toss of its head.

“Whist, whist! We’re on our way.”

After Sarcyn put the precious books into a saddlebag, he mounted and rode out fast, turning the horse away from the main road into the hills. Ever since they’d moved into the farm, he’d been planning escape routes. He’d gone about a quarter mile when he heard the jingle of tack that meant the gwerbret and his men were coming. Quickly he dismounted and held his horse’s mouth shut as the jingle grew louder, passed him, then slowly died away.

“So much for that dolt,” he whispered.

Yet as he remounted, he knew that the danger was far from over. Once the Brotherhood learned of Alastyr’s fate, assassins would come seeking him—and they were already in Deverry. He would have to stay on the run, always hiding, moving constantly, while he studied the books and learned the ways of power. Maybe he could keep ahead of the Hawks just long enough to garner enough magic to save his life. Maybe. It was the only hope he had.

As soon as Nevyn went into his trance, Jill moved back among the trees while Rhodry stayed close to the old man. The pale moonlight shone on the stream and turned the white birches into ghost trees. In the dweomer-touched silence, she was painfully aware of the sound of her own breathing. Nevyn lay so still that she kept wanting to kneel down beside him to see if he was alive. All at once she heard a sound behind her and spun, her sword raised and ready.