Pilgrim (41 page)

And waiting for him.

There was a slight movement to one side, and Drago looked.

Nothing.

No…there it was again. A deeper shadow moving behind an overturned barrel, and yet another shadow behind that one.

Drago’s eyes narrowed, then he squatted down and snapped his fingers, his mouth moving towards a smile.

Three of the shadows leaped out towards him—and resolved themselves into cats. Nine more rushed out in a group behind the first three. Tabbies, blacks, tortoiseshells and indeterminate patches, stripes and splotches—and there a sudden flash of white. All the result of countless generations of unsupervised and noisy breeding beneath the stamping hooves of the stable horses.

Sigholt’s cats, come to greet Drago. Four purred and bumped about him, half a dozen leapt onto his shoulders and clambered down his back, sinking in their claws in an ecstasy of greeting and love. Two more batted at and played with the laces of his boots.

Drago grinned, trying to rub all of them at least once, and detaching the grey tabby that had decided to cling joyously to his hair.

“Have you missed me, then?” he asked, and the cats doubled their attentions.

“I have a pack of great hounds waiting the other side of the bridge,” he said, laughing now. “Shall I invite them in?”

The cats knew an empty threat when they heard one. They shook with the strength of their purrs, dribbled with the power of their love, and kneaded Drago’s flesh with the intensity of their adoration.

And Drago adored them in return. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed them over the past months, and now memories of their friendship and comfort in his otherwise friendless and comfortless childhood came flooding back.

The toddling boy left to scream in fear and rejection on the damp cobbles of the inner courtyard. The cats, bumping sympathetic noses against his face, and cuddling their warm bodies next to his.

Drago closed his eyes, and buried his face in one of the furry bodies.

“Well now,” he said, when he thought it time to introduce a bit of decorum into proceedings. “It seems Sigholt has something for me. Do you perchance know—”

Before he’d finished speaking, every one of the cats had jumped away from him to stand stiff and watchful a pace away. Then, as one, the cats turned about and marched towards the kitchen door, their tails held high in the air.

“Either they want to be fed, or they
do
know more of Sigholt than its rat holes,” Drago murmured, and followed them into the kitchen.

He stopped, surprised. According to WingRidge, Sigholt had been deserted for many days, yet the kitchen ranges lining the far wall glowed with the strength of well-stocked firepits, and the tables lay dust-free and with cooking implements laid neatly out in ranks for the sleepy hands of the morning breakfast cook.

Several mixing bowls sat in the centre of one table, and Drago walked slowly over, ignoring the cats who had settled down in a semi-circle before the ranges.

Stars, but he loved this kitchen almost as much as he loved the cats. How many nights had he whiled away the sleepless, loveless hours creating the perfect crust, the tenderest sirloin?
Drago ran the fingers of one hand softly over the table as he passed by, imagining he could feel warmth and friendship radiating out to him from the well-scrubbed wood.

“Why?” he asked softly, raising his head and looking at the cats.

They purred, and slowly blinked their twelve-pair of eyes in immense self-satisfaction, but they did not answer.

Drago’s fingers glanced against one of the white ceramic mixing bowls, and he picked it up idly, balancing its weight in the palm of his hand. He stared at it, almost entranced, and then, with no idea why he did it, he slipped it into the sack at his side.

It should have almost filled the sack. At the very least, its weight should have made the sack too heavy and unwieldy to hang from Drago’s belt, but to his amazement as soon as it had slipped from his fingers into the dark, close womb of the sack the weight vanished. Even the
form
of the bowl vanished, and the sack hung as close and as comfortable as if he only had two or three marbles in it.

Drago stood still, one hand still poised over the sack. Over the past weeks, since he’d come through the Star Gate, he’d been adding odd bits and pieces to the sack without ever knowing why. A piece of moss from a table-top tree growing on the edge of the Silent Woman Woods; a crumbling handful of desiccated clay from the ravaged Plains of Tare; a crust he’d found on the doorstep of a deserted hamlet in northern Aldeni; a river-washed pebble from the Nordra; several white hairs from Belaguez’s tail. Many, many things. He’d added them only on impulse—or so he’d thought. Now he realised there was something else at work, for he’d added so much the sack should be bursting at its seams by now.

Magic? Enchantment?

Certainly. But
what
enchantment?

And why?

Drago abruptly realised the cats were purring so loud the kitchen was vibrating very slightly with the strength of their
rumbles, and he looked over to them. Again, as one, the twelve motley cats got to their feet and stalked, tails waving in the air, towards the door that led to the interior rooms and spaces of the Keep.

Drago followed.

They led him through the lower service corridors, past storerooms, servants’ quarters and unknown, unexplored chambers, up the stairs leading into the main living and reception areas of Sigholt, and finally into the Great Hall.

A pace inside the door, Drago stopped, and then walked forward hesitantly. The cats had walked over to a far wall and sat down under one of the huge tapestries that lined its stone.

Drago did not look at them. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the dais at the far end of chamber. This hall held no pleasant memories.

Here, the SunSoar family had sat about the fire and laughed without him.

Here, great Councils had been held. Without him.

Here, receptions and galas and the magnificence of the SunSoar court had glittered, and all, all of it, every last single bloody bit, without him.

And here Caelum and WolfStar had twisted and manipulated to do away with him once and for all. Here he had been falsely accused and then convicted of RiverStar’s murder.

Drago’s feet slowed even further as he reached the centre of the hall. Caelum’s enchantment falsifying Drago’s memory of his sister’s death had been powerful beyond compare.

“What a waste,” Drago said to the hall, listening to his words echo about its vastness. “What a waste of a wonderful man and an extraordinary power.”

And even as he said it, Drago did not truly know if he referred to Caelum with those words…or to himself.

His staff, almost forgotten, scraped against the stone flagging, and Drago jerked out of his reverie as it twisted in
his hand. He looked about for the cats, saw them sitting patiently against the far wall, sighed and walked over. He stopped three paces away from the tapestry under which they had placed themselves, and stared.

He knew it well. How many times had he stood where he was now and gazed into its magic for hours on end, hungering for the power it portrayed, and hungering for the woman it portrayed to turn her eyes, just slightly, and see him?

And seeing him, laugh, and reach out to embrace him.

The tapestry depicted Azhure at the height of her magical frenzy at Gorkenfort, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Skraelings with her magical bow, the Alaunt streaming out of the wraiths’ nests and boltholes amid the rubble, driving the screaming and gibbering Skraelings before them.

It was fully night-time, the moon casting a silvery glow upon the ethereal scene. Grey blocks of masonry piled into massive heaps of meaningless rubble. Moonwildflowers, drifting down from an unseen sky. Alaunt hounds, all spectral-pale save for their gaping, slavering scarlet mouths and golden eyes. Azhure atop her red Corolean stallion Venator, her raven hair flying and her face alive with magic, the Wolven singing destruction in her hands, and the quiver of unending arrows, all fletched in the blue of her eyes, strapped tight to her back.

Gods! Drago could almost swear he could see her lean backwards to seize an arrow and put it to the Wolven, and then hear it scream as it flew through the night to plunge into one of the silvery orbs of a Skraeling.

And yet now something was very, very different about this tapestry. It had lost its magic.

It was only Drago’s memory that gave Azhure’s face its aura of enchantment. As he blinked and focused sharply on the tapestry, he saw that now the threads had worn and her face was…well…a trifle threadbare.

The bodies and faces of the Alaunt, once so clearly depicted, were even more shabby, almost as if only a memory
lingered, not their form. Now they were truly ghosts in this wall hanging. Loose ends of thread hung out in unsightly tatters, and Drago had to narrow his eyes and concentrate to make out the individual hounds. Even then, four or five of them had so lost their definition they had merged into one unsightly splotch, the backing canvas clearly showing through the worn embroidery.

Everything in the tapestry had faded and unravelled, just as the Star Dance had been all but lost.

Everything, save one thing.

The Wolven
glowed.
Its warm ivory wood with its golden tracery, its scarlet and blue tassels, its silvered bowstring, all gave a sense of reality, of
impatient
reality, within the fading insignificance of the rest of the tapestry.

Sigholt’s gift. The Wolven.

As the Alaunt had come to Drago, so here sat the Wolven. Waiting.

Drago tried to remember when he had last seen Azhure use the Wolven. It had been many, many years, and Azhure had probably handed it over to Caelum with the Sceptre when he’d ascended the Throne of the Stars. As Caelum had hidden the Sceptre with enchantment, so he had hidden the Wolven—in plain view of everyone, and yet more hidden than if he’d secreted it in the deepest dungeon.

Drago still stared unblinking at the Wolven. Here it sat—trapped by enchantment.

“So, Caelum,” he said, very slowly and very softly, “what was the enchantment you used? What must I do to retrieve this bow?”

And Caelum did not answer. Drago knew he faced a test: release the Wolven, and retrieve yet another part of his lost Acharite magic. Drago felt that if he understood how to release the Wolven, he would break the thickest barrier to the full use of his ancient Acharite power…the Enemy’s power.

Was Sigholt’s gift the Wolven? Or the ability to make full use of his power?

Drago sank down to the floor, sitting cross-legged, chin in hand, his staff laid before him. Thinking.

The cats, satisfied, curled up into tight balls, but they still kept their eyes on Drago.

“I am no Enchanter,” Drago said, thinking it out aloud, “for the Demons have used up all my Icarii ability. And even had they not, there is no music of the Star Dance to manipulate with Song. But the Star Dance still
exists
, even if I cannot hear it.”

Drago trailed off into silence. Power was still there for the using…StarDrifter’s opening of the door to Sanctuary was proof enough of that. It was the power of the land, which was the power of the craft which had drifted for millennia amongst the stars, absorbing the Star Dance.

And Noah had bred it into the Acharites.

StarDrifter had tapped into the power of the land by using dance as a form of pattern.

“The Star Dance—or its power,” Drago said, speaking his thoughts out softly, “is contained in the land, a gift from the craft. And now this power rests in me…”

So how to access it?

Pattern. Pattern was the key. Song and music was nothing, but pattern. Dance was pattern. Drago took a deep breath and slowly rose, using the staff to help lift himself. He stood indecisively, leaning on the staff as if it, perhaps, held the answer. Could he use dance to form the pattern, the enchantment, needed to release the Wolven?

But what was the enchantment that Caelum had used in the first instance? Drago would have to know that if he was to—

He cursed, absolutely stunned, and stepped back a pace, dropping the staff at the same time. As he’d been wondering what enchantment Caelum had used, the staff had vibrated in his hand. It had not been an unpleasant sensation, but surprising in the extreme.

Now Drago bent down and retrieved the staff. It still vibrated, and with a growing sense of excitement Drago realised that the pattern of fletched circles that ran about the staff was moving.

Showing him…showing him a pattern. The pattern of the Song Caelum had originally used to hide the Wolven.

The staff was acting in the same way that Drago suspected Zenith, and probably Axis and Caelum, had used their rings. How many times had he seen Zenith glance at her ring before she sang a Song of Enchantment? Did their diamonds alter the same way these circles now altered?

Yes!

It was a pattern, and knowing what it was, Drago found the reading of it easy. Translate the distance, both width and height between the fletched circles (
notes!
) into music—easy enough—and then the music into the steps of a dance.

Done!

But there was a problem.

StarDrifter was an accomplished dancer—his Icarii grace would be enough to make him elegant even had he two broken legs and moth-eaten wings.

But Drago had lost his Icarii grace and elegance, and as he now stumbled about in front of the tapestry—even the cats raising their heads to watch and grin—he knew that his skill on the dance floor would see him dead the instant he tried to outwit even the least of the Demons, let alone Qeteb.

No, no, there had to be a different way, and Drago realised it would have something to so with his innate Acharite power.

He stopped fumbling about with his feet, and stood again staring at the tapestry. Pattern…music was pattern…dance was pattern…and for different reasons both those were denied him.

Unbidden a memory surfaced. Standing before the doorway that eventually led to Noah. The recessed rectangular section beside the door, filled with nine slightly
raised knobs. His fingers dancing over the knobs, pressing each in turn. Forming a pattern.