Katharine Kerr - A Time of War

‘I will, then. But sir, will you come back if we get lost?’

‘Now that I can’t promise. I have other affairs on hand.’

With that he disappeared, so suddenly and completely gone that Jahdo was sure he’d dreamt the entire thing – until he realized that he could never fall asleep standing knee-deep in cold water. He filled the skins and rushed back to the bard, who was currying the white horse.

‘Meer, Meer, the strangest thing just happened! I did see this man, and then he were gone, all at once like.’

‘Indeed? Suppose you start at the beginning of this peculiar tale, lad, and tell it to me slowly.’

Jahdo did, paying particular attention to the fellow’s directions. For a long time Meer said nothing, merely laid his huge hands on the horse’s back as if for the comfort of the touch and stared sightlessly up at the sky.

‘Well, now,’ he rumbled at last. ‘I told your mother, didn’t I, that you were marked for a great destiny?’

‘Well, you said maybe I was.’

‘And I was right.’ Meer ignored the qualification. ‘To have seen one of the gods is the greatest honour a man can have.’

‘That were one of your gods?’

‘It was. Did I not pray for guidance in our travelling? Did he not come to provide it?’

Jahdo shuddered. He felt as if snow had slipped from a roof down his back, and it took him a long time to be able to speak.

‘You be sure that were a god? He didn’t look like much.’

‘You ill-got little cub! It’s not for us to question how the gods choose to appear to us.’

‘My apologies, then, but you be sure it weren’t one of those demons you do talk about?’

‘Not if he gave his name as Evandar the Avenger, the archer of Rinbala, goddess of the sea, he whose silver arrows could pierce the moon itself and fetch it from the sky.’

‘Well, he only said Evandar, not all the rest of that stuff.’

‘The rest of that stuff, as you so inelegantly put it, happen to be two of his major attributes and one of his minor ones, as attested by the holy hymns themselves. Humph. I can see that I’d best attend to your education. Besides, if he’d been a demon, he’d have tried to snatch you away, to make me fail in my quest.’

Jahdo went cold again, a bone-touching chill worse than any god-induced awe.

‘I smell fear,’ Meer said.

‘Well, do you blame me?’

‘Of course not. Lead me over to our gear, lad, and open the big grey saddlebags. I’ve got some very powerful amulets in there, and a feather talisman wound and blessed by the High Priestess herself, and I think me you’d best wear them from now on.’

They met on horseback and alone at the boundary of their two domains, which lay far beyond the physical world in the peculiar reaches of the etheric plane. In this empire of images, a dead-brown moor stretched all round them to a horizon where a perennially setting sun fought through smoke, or so it seemed, to flood them with copper-coloured light. Evandar rode unarmoured, wearing only his tunic and leather trousers as he lounged on his golden stallion. Since he sat with one leg crooked round the saddle peak, a single shove of a fist or weapon would have knocked him to the ground, but he smiled as he considered his brother. Riding on a black horse, and glittering with black enamelled armour as well, the brother was more than a little vulpine. Since he carried his black-plumed helmet under one arm, you could see his pointed ears tufted with red fur and the roach of red hair that ran from his forehead over his skull and down to the back of his neck. His beady black eyes glittered above a long, sharp nose.

‘You’re a fool, Evandar,’ the fox warrior snarled. ‘Coming here alone like this.’

‘Am I now? Your message said you needed my help. Was it all a trap and ambuscade?’

He grunted, slung his helmet from a strap on the saddle, and began to pull off his gauntlets. Russet fur plumed on the backs of his hands, and each finger ended in a sharp black claw rather than a nail.

‘First you lose your wife, your dear darling Alshandra,’ he said at last. ‘And now I hear you’ve lost your daughter as well.’

‘Alshandra’s gone, true enough, and good riddance to the howling harridan, say I! My daughter? Not lost in the least.’ Evandar paused for a grin. ‘I know exactly where my Elessario is, though indeed she’s gone from this place. Elessario lies safe in a human womb, and soon she’ll be born into the world of men and elves.’

The fox warrior shrugged, indifferent to the fact now that the barb had missed its mark. He turned in his saddle and spent a long moment staring at the horizon, where the bloody-coloured light fumed and roiled. It seemed that the smoke was stretching higher, sending long red fingers toward the horizon.

‘What have you done to the Lands? Hah?’ His voice at times barked like a fox’s as well. ‘You’ve done somewhat, you bastard swine, you scum of all the stars. We can feel it. We can see it. The Lands are shrinking and fading. My court sickens.’

‘What makes you think that’s my doing?’

‘It’s always your doing, what happens to the Lands.’ He stared at the ground, grudging each word. ‘You made them, you shaped them. Doesn’t Time feed in your pasture as well?’

‘And what does the flow of days have to do with one wretched thing?’

‘Don’t you see? The turning of the wheel brings decay, and Time runs like a galloping horse these days. You’re the only one who can grab its reins. Make it slow, brother, for the sake of all of us, my court as well as yours.’

For an answer Evandar merely laughed. A weapon flashed in his brother’s hand, a silver sword held high and ready. Evandar unhooked his leg, leaned forward in the saddle, stared into the black, glittering eyes and stared him down. The fox warrior snarled, but the weapon swung into its sheath.

‘You won’t kill me, younger brother,’ Evandar said, but quietly, lest a grin or a laugh be taken as mockery. ‘Because you don’t know what will happen to you if I die. Neither do I, for that matter, but I’ll wager it would be naught good.’

The fox warrior shrugged the statement away.

‘What have you done to the Lands?’ he repeated. ‘Tell me.’

‘Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you.’

‘No! Never! Not that!’

‘Then I’ll say naught in return.’

For a long moment the fox warrior hesitated, his lips half-parted as if he would speak, then he snarled with a jerk of his reins, swung his horse’s head round and kicked him hard. As he galloped away in a rise of dust, Evandar watched, smiling faintly.

‘You stupid fool,’ he said aloud. ‘It should be obvious what’s happening to the Lands. They’re dying.’

He turned his horse and jogged off, heading for the green refuge along the last river, where his magic, the enchantments that had carved kingdoms out of the shifting stuff of the etheric plane, still held.

Although he most certainly wasn’t the god Meer thought him, Evandar held enormous power, drawn straight from the currents of the upper astral, which shapes the etheric the way that the etheric shapes the physical. He knew how to weave – with enormous effort – the shifting astral light and twine it into forms that seemed, at least, as solid as matter, though he’d also had to master the art of constantly channelling energy into those forms to keep them alive. In the thousands of years of his existence, which he’d spent trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time, he’d had plenty of leisure to learn.

Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when Evandar and his people were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, ‘stayed behind’ and never been born into physical bodies. Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire – or so he’d been told, and so he believed, simply because he loved the woman who’d told him the tale and for no other reason of intellect or logic.