That Way Lies Camelot (21 page)

* * *

Iveldane shivered free of memory's grasp. He stared at the mound he had raised, as though his eyes could read the Wizard's thoughts written on the earth itself.
i
f you had been on the shore the day I won free of the sea, I would have left you,' he said to the still air. instead, I learned hatred. You taught me, when I reached dry soil, and you bade the earth imprison me in turn. Tell me,
how does it feel?'

Iveldane smiled, accustomed now to silence. 'But it was the fire which came after that made me desire your death .. .'

* * *

For fire had been a cruel warden. Iveldane had needed every secret he had gleaned from earth, sea, and air for bare survival, and even that knowledge was not enough to ease his agony. Of all elements, flesh was least tolerant of fire, and the volcano in which the Master of Trevior had chained him was far hotter than any flame. Iveldane's screams had shaken the roots of the mountain. Desire for vengeance alone bound him to life. Ten centuries, he endured unimaginable torment, all for hope of the chance to trap the World's Master at his mercy.

But his strength had run out. Cursing, he had lost his battle, and flame had consumed him, utterly. Yet he did not perish. Possessed by the volcano's molten core, its lessons had scarred his soul. He eme
rged with mastery of fire, and
an unquenchable passion to inflict punishment on the Wizard who had consigned him to torment...

* * *

Restless in his triumph, Iveldane released his binding spell. Soil slithered back, exposing the Wizard's torso. The Master's face was streaked with dirt. Grit had brought tears to his eyes.

'What a sorry sight you are.' Iveldane rose and leaned close. 'I haven't the patience to waste centuries for your secrets.'

The Wizard stirred dusty shoulders. 'Between us there are no secrets. I was Maegrel's apprentice.'

'You!'
Iveldane stared, and the ice cave rang again with his laughter. On impulse, he seized the Wizard's arms and, with cruel force, jerked them free of the earth. The Wizard blanched in pain. Yet he did not resist as Iveldane twisted his wrists and bared scars twin to the ones the bracelets covered.

'This, for loyalty?' Iveldane released his enemy and stepped back.

'No.' The Wizard's voice caught. He paused to cough up dust. 'Maegrel thought me ambitious.'

'You returned and killed him.' Iveldane waited, still as a serpent.

'To my sorrow.' The Wizard spoke without bitterness, it was not necessary.'

Iveldane smiled with poisonous delight. 'Do you plead with me for your life?
I'm
amused.' Suddenly his expression darkened like a stormfront, and a sharp word left his lips. Fire rose, crackling from the torn earth. The Wizard screamed, even as his apprentice had screamed when the lava had seared his flesh. 'Master, one day you will plead with me for death.'

Iveldane turned his back on the Wizard's suffering and retired from the ice cave to more comfortable quarters above ground. The setting of the snare had taxed him, and though the Wizard's demise rang sweet in his ears, he wanted rest. Settling himself on a silken bed, he slept...

* * *

..
. and dreamed. Cold with horror, he saw the earth stripped of life. Trees cast shadows gaunt as skeletons over sere ground. Lake basins shimmered under mirage, dust-dry, and webbed with fissures. The air was poisoned by the stench of death. Pierced to the soul with unnameable pain, Iveldane opened his mouth to cry out. No sound came.

He fell upon the ground, dug his hands to the wrists in ruined soil. Great, hoarse gasps ripped his throat as he shaped the commands which would call air, water, earth, and fire to his will. Emotionally flayed by the earth's torment, he stared as the sky wheeled above him, yet no response came. No living force answered; even the oceans were dry.

Crushed by despair, Iveldane wept. The soil drank his tears. Night fell, garish with stars, and a three-quarter moon rose, grinning like a skull. Iveldane covered his face with his fingers. The earth's wounds pained him as the fires never had. Racked by inconsolable loss, Iveldane screamed at the empty sky.

'Who has done this?' The shout lost itself without echo. Rage flared in his gut.
'Who has done this?'

'I.'

Iveldane flinched at the sound of that familiar, hated voice. Slowly he rose to his feet.

Sure and unmarked in blue and gold, the Master of Trevior stood at his shoulder. 'I have caused the death of the earth. Dare you return and avenge it?'

Iveldane stared into eyes as reasonless as a snake's. His shaking hands reached to throttle the pale, soft throat of his enemy. But the Master's form shimmered and vanished.

* * *

Iveldane woke weeping. Anger shook him like a stormwind. He flung the coverlet from him with violence enough to tear it. Back, he went, to the ice cave, possessed by fury no pity could contain. Icicles flashed, prismatic in the flickering light, until his shadow quenched them. Captive still, the Wizard of Trevior writhed in his chains, tormented by a crown of fire. Iveldane banished the flames with a glance.

Coarse against sudden silence, the sound of his breathing mingled with its own echoes. 'I am going to destroy you.
Do you hear me?'

The singed head stirred. The Wizard looked up, his cheeks crystalline, awash with tears. 'I hear.' His voice was serene, even joyful.

The incongruity struck Iveldane like a blow. The great anger in his soul faltered and, dizzied suddenly, he staggered back. 'Filth! Earth-murderer! As World's Master, how can you weep for joy?'

'That title is no longer mine.' The Wizard raised eyes that were clear of deception. 'You, as my successor, at last have delivered me from that responsibility, and the power with it.'

Iveldane drew a harsh, sobbing breath, and saw it was so. Water, air, fire, and earth had each impressed him with their secrets, and the dream had shown him how deeply ingrained was the instinct to protect all that lay under his charge. Like a blind man given sight, Iveldane reached out with his mind, and saw the earth whole in the moonlight.

'Did you think I would punish you for nothing?' The Wizard spoke with such trepidation, Iveldane laughed and made haste to release him.

Dreamsinger's Tale

The spring grass grew long and lush in the glade, and a brook where peepers shrilled in annual courtship ran close by. There, Huntress Skyfire flung herself down, panting and hot after a long run through the forest. She drank and splashed cold water through her hair, then shed her bow and her spear and her sweaty, winter-musty furs and rolled onto her back. Mother moon peeped like a needle of bone through the leaves. Skyfire regarded its thin crescent and sighed, not quite content. Something was missing, lacking,
not right.
Hard as she ran, fast as she could shoot an arrow into fleeing prey, she could not quite catch up with whatever it was.

Her wolf-friend, Woodbiter, arrived at the clearing. Old now, and surly where he had once been full of antics, he had leaves sticking in his coat. With his ears canted back, he crouched in the grass, panting also. The breeze that wafted through his fur carried the scent of something dead.

** Rolled in a scent patch. Again,** Skyfire sent. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Woodbiter regarded her with unwinking yellow eyes. **Go hunting now.** The wolfs image held the savory taste of hot blood, the thrill and the kick of prey as his jaws closed and snapped the spine.

**No.** Skyfire rolled onto her elbows, irritable as a she-wolf past her heat. **No.** She was hungry, but hunger was not what drove her. She would go hunting, but not now, not tonight.

Woodbiter endured his elf-friend's gaze for the span of a heartbeat, then whined, rolled, and showed the pale fur of his throat to appease her aggressive mood. **Hunt alone,** he sent. When the Huntress neither answered nor forbade him, he sprang up and slunk off into the forest.

Skyfire hammered her fist into soft spring soil and flopped with her chin on her elbows. The
not right
feeling persisted. Though she tried, she could find no name for it. This was no anticipation of danger, like the moment when the prong-horn's charge caught a spear-thrower off guard. Neither was it a feeling of threat, like the packs of human hunters who sometimes wandered too near the holt. Skyfire twisted two grass stems between her fingers. Decidedly, this was not even the faintly giddy feeling one got after eating too many dreamberries. She frowned at the brook, and watched the moon's broken reflection frown back. She could not say why she was here, lying idle in new grass when her belly growled with hunger. Well after nightfall, the tribe would be wondering why their chieftess did not appear to lead the hunt. Yet Skyfire made no effort to rise. She would not take up her spear. Some instinct as deep as earth urged her to linger.

She plucked a grass blade and chewed the stem, only to spit it out because it tasted sour. In the stream the shape of the moon rippled on as if nothing was wrong. The peepers shrilled in a forest that seemed touched by strange, waiting silence; not the quiet of approaching predators, but a sort of stillness that caused the hair to prickle. In that moment, with discontent sharp as a thorn in her side, Skyfire first heard the singing.

The melody touched her first, high and sweet and filled with the vitality of growing things. Skyfire tilted her head, tense and listening. She sniffed the air, but smelled no taint of humans. Belatedly she noticed that this song held none of the grunts which passed for language among the five-fingers. Perhaps in sound, perhaps in sending, this singer used no words at all, only notes laid out in brightness and light. Each lilted phrase filled Skyfire with a pure and innocent joy. Without quite knowing she had moved, she found herself on her feet. The song drew her as nothing in memory had ever done before.

Only the sternest habits of survival made her remember the spear, bow, and quiver lying in the grass. She paused to gather them up, though the delay made her ache. The sweaty fur garment she had shed no longer seemed important, so she abandoned it. Clad only in thin leather tunic and cross-laced boots, Skyfire slipped into the dark of the forest.

As only an elf or a wolf could move, she followed the elusive song through thicket and draw. Yet the singer eluded her. Between the black boles of oaks, over ferny hummocks and marshy hollows, he walked and left no marks. Neither branch nor briar nor deadfall seemed to slow him. Huntress Skyfire shook her bright hair in annoyance. She was considered a fine tracker, lacking only the nose of a wolf to unravel the most difficult trails. She hurried, silent and adept and forest-cunning, and determined as never before; but somehow, the uncanny song caused her native grace to abandon her. Scratched on twigs, scraped on thorns, she felt clumsy as a five-finger, and as foolish. Yet to stop or even slow down was to lose the music that even now filtered through a copse of saplings. The melody ran flawless as stream water, describing delight that bordered the edges of pain. Skyfire ran. Breathless, she twisted around tree branches and half tripped on roots and vines. Still the singer evaded her. His melody drew relentlessly farther ahead, until at length it became no more than the memory of beauty, the fading essence of dream.

Skyfire cursed and stumbled to her knees in moss. Tired, confused, and even hotter than before, she rubbed at scratches on her spear arm. The discontent which had troubled her earlier intensified, became a disappointment near to sickness. She jabbed at soft earth with her spear
-
butt. The silence, the terrible absence of song, left her aching in a way that knew no remedy.

Around her, night had begun to fail. Gray light shone between branches and new leaves, and birds awakened singing. Soon humans might be abroad, dangerous to any elf who foolishly stayed in the open. For once Skyfire did not care. Crossly she threw herself prone, her chin cupped in her fists. She did not move as the world grew golden with dawn, nor when the sun speared slanting through the boughs, striping her shoulders with warmth. Furious at her own folly, yet helpless to free herself of yearning, she lay and frowned until her head ached and her thoughts spun with hunger. The music pulled at her still. The memory did not fade before the
now
awareness of her wolf-sense; notes spilled and echoed in her mind until she wanted to weep, bereft.

Woodbiter found her at midday. The wolf had fared well on his hunt and his belly was gorged. He had dragged his kill beneath a fallen log, then urinated upon the place to mark it; the cache was not far, and still fresh. Yet meat would not assuage the emptiness left by the singer. Skyfire refused her wolf-friend's offer.

The animal sensed her discontent. He licked her eyelids in commiseration, and finally curled in the shade to sleep.

Skyfire left him there. Irritable and alone, she arose and retraced her trail from the night before. The path of her run was clear, a swath of torn leaves and twigs freshly snapped. Many times she had stepped carelessly on soft soil and left the imprint of her booted foot. Although she searched and sniffed, she found nothing of the singer. His melody haunted her. Once when she might have stopped to spear fish, his memory stung her haplessly onward.

In time, the daystar lowered and the birds flew to roost. Exhausted, and hopelessly in thrall to the singer's dream, Skyfire stumbled and fell. She caught herself short of a bang on the head; and there, between her hands, found the impression of a bare foot. The track had four toes, clearly made by an elf. Yet Skyfire knew at once that none of her own tribe had trodden here. Precisely between the hollow of toes and heel, there bloomed a flower entirely out of phase with the season.

Astonishment overwhelmed Skyfire, and her breath caught. For no reason she could name, she knelt by the blossom and wept. Then, as if the release of emotion had snapped the dream's hold on her mind, she acknowledged the sending from the holt which had sought her for some hours. Most oddly, it was Twigleaf, the youngest cub in the tribe, whose call reached her first. Skyfire returned reassurance of her well-being. Then, with weariness similar to the feeling of waking from dreams of escaped prey, she rose and returned to lead the hunt.