Mercedes Lackey - Prison of Souls

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

"Let's begin," Naitachal said, casting his black cloak to one side and raising his practice sword in salute. "And see if you can get through this drill without tripping over yourself." He smiled, softening the sarcasm just a little. Few ever saw a Dark Elf smile and survived to tell about it; but Naitachal's smile meant only what any human's would, and it warmed his cold blue eyes in a way that no other Dark Elf could match.

His apprentice Alaire returned the salute with his practice sword, and stifled a sardonic reply.

This time, Master Naitachal, you'd better watch Alaire thought as he checked his footing on the coarse gravel. I've been practicing while you were away!

They faced each other on the small practice field of the Dark Elf's modest estate. Alaire was a head taller than his mentor, but Naitachal had decades of experi- ence. Both were slender, rather than heavily muscled.

At high noon the sun shone directly from above, a dis- advantage to neither swordsmen.

The contest began, a graceful dance of flesh and wood, their oak swords clacking away in the bright sun. Alaire lunged early, catching Naitachal by sur- prise. But the elf parried and thrust easily, slipping out of the trap the youth was setting up, trying to pin the elf against a tree. Alaire charged, using his blade like a broadsword, and using his greater reach to forc Master to the edge of the field. Naitachal tucked and rolled, becoming a blur of black motion that vanished behind Alaire before he turned, then reappeared at the periphery of Alaire's vision.

"I thought you said no magic!" Alaire protested, fielding a counterattack with difficulty.

"None used," Naitachal said smoothly. "Pay atten- tion to the sword, lad."

Alaire yielded to Naitachal's powerful, but meas- ured thrusts, hoping to gain control of the contest.

Dark Elf tripped and wavered momentarily as he lost his balance, but gained it back quickly.

"Good move," Naitachal said, as their weapons clacked; the contest fell into a mesmerizing rhyt Alaire probed for a weakness in the Dark Elf's defense. 'Ten more of those and we might come out even."

The bardling grinned; he Liked how his teacher turned praise into a demand for more and better effort. It kept the game interesting.

Alaire sensed that the Dark Elf was intentionally ignoring his weaker left side. Only yesterday Naitachal had drilled him endlessly, attacking on his left, until that side ached. Now... nothing. Even as he consid- ered this, Naitachal sidestepped off the field, ducked behind a tree and came out on the weaker left.

Alaire was ready. Instead of backpedaling he lunged again. The tip of the sword touched the edge of Nai- tachal's black tunic, but no more; the elf had sidestepped. Alaire cursed softly, catching a glint of amusement in Naitachal's dark blue eyes.

Anger surged briefly over him as the swords clashed, though Naitachal was only doing what any Master should. The pace of the combat increased. The two moved back towards the center of the practice field, kicking up dust in the process. Naitachal was not going to relinquish his control of the combat that easily.

Dark Elf's breathing was a little more labored now.

After first faking high to lure Alaire's point away from his intended target, the elf came in low with his sword.

Alaire deflected it, knocking the elf's swordtip into the dirt. If he'd parried a little harder, he might have disarmed his Master, and that would have been a first.

Too easy. Far too easy, Alaire thought, wondering what distracted his mentor today. Normally he would have landed me on my backside by now. He knew he was an average swordsman; Naitachal was a master, with uncounted years of practice behind him. Was something wrong? Had the elf learned something on his last journey to cause him worry?

The bardlings thoughts wandered slightly, enough to give the Dark Elf an advantage.

"Look!" Naitachal shouted, pointing with his free hand. "A comet!"

Alaire looked without thinking, following Nai- tachal's gaze and pointing finger, to something above and behind him. As his attention wavered, Naitachal dropped his own blade to the side and shouldered into him. The next second, he was sitting in the dust in an undignified heap.

Naitachal regarded him calmly with disappoint- ment and faint, elven amusement. "I can't believe you fell for that, bardling."

"Not fair!" Alaire protested weakly, somehow man- aging to laugh at himself. Boy, was that stupid. Fell, or rather stepped, right into that one. "I was winning and you cheated."

"If you were really winning you wouldn't be sitting there like that," Naitachal said. "We're getting to the point in your training when almost anything is fair.

The real world is like that. Assassins," he added, his sword waving in the sunlight as if to punctuate the sentence, "will go to any lengths to kill their mark."

"What would an assassin want with me?" he replied, but only half seriously. Someone might want me dead, if only to get at my father. Being the eighth son o King put him in an awkward position. Derek, the first born and oldest brother, would almost certainly become king one day. The other brothers were train- ing for important government or military positions.

Yet, the King had never planned on having so many sons. As he once half-complained to the Queen, any other woman would have produced at least a few daughters along the way. Eventually he ran out of things to do with them.

Alaire, being the eighth and youngest son, enjoyed the rare luxury of choosing his life's work. He had been a very precocious child, and at six, he had decided to become a Bard. Fortunately, Naitachal was an old friend of the King as well as a loyal friend to many generations of the family. No one questioned wh Master would be.

This had not been a childish whim, but a real voca- tion. Naitachal had been able to assure the King that his son's talent was considerable, and that all would be well.

In many ways, his choice of lifework made him a less likely mark. The older brothers would certainly make better targets than he would. However, Alaire could not ignore the possibility that he could be sin- gled out by young toughs looking for a fight Naitachal had often pointed this out when he was sitting in the dust after a thorough trouncing.

For a year Alaire had trained under the King's Laureate, Gawaine, and under his guidance convinced everyone that he had an exceptional degree of musi- cal, and magical, talent. However, Gawaine was getting no younger; he had other students be Alaire, as well as the enormous burden demanded by his office of Laureate. Gawaine eventually found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the workload.

Since Alaire was hardly an ordinary, common stu Gawaine had known he ran the risk of favoring him over the other bardlings. It would have been a situ- ation fraught with trouble for a younger man Gawaine; for the Laureate, it was something he simply did not have the strength to deal with.

By this time Alaire was eight, and he had heard enough tales about Naitachal to be both excited and alarmed by having him as his Master. Though h "always" assumed Naitachal would be his teacher, he certainly didn't know what to expect from the mysteri- ous elf; the Necromancers becoming a Bard was bizarre enough. He had never seen a Dark Elf before; he'd had no notion that his father had used the "Dark Elf" so literally.

In the bright, airy colors of the court, Naitachal had stood out like a drop of ink on a white lace tablecloth.

The black cloak he wore habitually flowed about him as if it were liquid, and the tunic, hose and boots seemed to absorb whatever light hit them, as i Bard's body was a place that canceled daylight. Top- ping the darkness was his straight, silver hair that hung down his back, long as all elves wore it, and swept gracefully from side to side as he turned. His brilliant blue eyes, twin pools of color in the smooth black skin of that ageless face, burned right through Alaire when they first met. They distracted him, even now, during sword practice. Alaire soon found out Naitachal was no ordinary Dark Elf, if there could be such a thing.