Katharine Kerr - The Silver Mage

‘What?’ Gallo gaped at him like a dolt. ‘But that’s unclean!’

‘Sorcery such as my friend Caswallinos studies is not unclean.’ He pried himself off the tree trunk and walked over. ‘My name, by the by, is Evandar.’

Rhodorix dropped to his knees. ‘Forgive my brother, Mighty One,’ he said. ‘He can’t kneel before you. He’s badly hurt.’

‘So I see,’ Evandar said to him, then turned back to Galerinos. ‘Your master, in fact, that very same Caswallinos, asked if I might find you for him. Come walk with me.’

Galerinos obeyed, striding uphill to join the being that everyone in the migration of the Devetii assumed was a god. Together they moved a few paces off. As Rhodorix got up to keep a watch downhill, he felt the air turn cool around him. He glanced up and saw a mist forming in the sky, a strange opalescent cloud shot through with pale lavender gleams and glints. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

‘Ye gods!’ Gerontos said abruptly. ‘They’re gone!’

Rhodorix spun around to look where his brother pointed. Sure enough, Evandar and Galerinos both had vanished. As he watched, the cloud of peculiar mist began to shrink into a swirl of grey and lavender. In a heartbeat it had disappeared as well. Rhodorix tried to speak, then merely shook his head in bafflement.

‘Do you think Gallo will bring us back some aid?’ Gerontos said.

‘I hope so,’ Rhodorix said. ‘I’d think so.’ Yet he felt that he lied. Why would the clan care about two shamed men such as themselves? Especially me , he thought, I’m the one who led us right into the trap.

With a curse and a groan of pain, Gerontos let himself slide down against the boulder until he sat upon the ground. Rhodorix sat down next to him and prayed that the gods would allow his clan to take mercy on his brother.

To Galerinos it seemed as if he and Evandar had walked but a few feet away. The god, as he thought of the being next to him, paused and turned to face him.

‘Your master worried when you lads didn’t come back,’ Evandar said. ‘He and some of the other men found that battlefield, if you can call it that. A slaughter yard, more like.’

‘So it was,’ Galerinos said. ‘I’m surprised that any of us got away.’

‘They assumed you’d been taken prisoner, so I said I’d fetch you back.’

‘You have my humble thanks.’ Galerinos glanced around and saw nothing but mist all around them. ‘Where are the other two?’

‘Back where I left them. I told Casso that I’d bring you back. He said naught about your friends.’

‘I can’t desert them!’

‘You already have.’ Evandar grinned with the wide-eyed innocence of a small child and pointed off in the distance.

Galerinos spun around to look downhill. The mist was lifting, revealing a clear view of the camp, only some five hundred yards away. Horses, wagons, people – they spread out in a dusty spiral on the plain, desolate except for grass, crisping in the autumn heat, and a few straggly trees. A faint umbrella of brown dust hung in the air above the conjoint tribes of the Devetii, refugees from the Rhwmani wars.

Out in the open grass stood Caswallinos, his hands on his hips, his staff caught between his side and the crook of his left elbow. For someone so blessed by divine power, he was an unprepossessing fellow, almost as skinny as his staff and bald except for a fuzz of grey stubble round the back of his skull. As they hurried down to join him, Galerinos was expecting his master to kneel before the god. Instead, the old man merely smiled and bobbed his head in Evandar’s direction.

‘My humble thanks for returning this stray colt to me,’ Caswallinos said. ‘I take it the other lads are all dead.’

‘Two were still alive last I saw them,’ Evandar said.

‘Then where are they?’

‘Still up on the mountain. They were wearing iron, and so I left them there.’

Caswallinos sighed and ran a hand over his face as if he were profoundly weary. ‘What have I told you about wyrd?’ he said. ‘And how things undone redound upon you?’

‘Do you think those two are part of my wyrd?’ Evandar said.

‘They are now, since you left them somewhere to die.’

‘But they were wearing iron.’ Evandar stamped his foot like an angry woman. ‘Iron swords, iron shirts. It aches me.’

‘I know that,’ Caswallinos said. ‘No one was asking you to touch them.’

The supposed god – Galerinos found his belief in Evandar’s divinity crumbling – stared at the druid for a long moment, then turned away. He seemed to be watching the white clouds drifting in from the south.

‘We need our two lads back,’ Caswallinos said, ‘and we need water.’

‘You’re not far from a big river.’ Evandar kept his back to the druid. ‘Head to where the sun rises. It won’t take you long to reach it.’

‘I wish you’d told me that this morning.’

Evandar merely shrugged.

‘If you had,’ Caswallinos went on, ‘those lads wouldn’t be dead, and the last two stranded on a mountainside.’

‘Oh.’ Evandar turned around to face him. ‘Mayhap their wyrd is mine, then.’

‘It is.’

Evandar pouted down at the ground for a long moment. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said at last. ‘But I shan’t bring them here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ll be leaving to find that river.’

‘Will you bring them to me there?’

‘I shan’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the river’s too wide. Too much water!’ He vanished, completely and suddenly gone without even a shred of the opalescent mist to cover his departure.

Caswallinos muttered a few words under his breath, something highly unpleasant from what Galerinos could hear of it.

‘Master?’ Galerinos said. ‘Is Evandar truly a god?’

‘Of course not! I’m not sure what he is, mind, but he’s most assuredly not divine.’

‘But he opened the sea road for our ships, and he comes and goes –’

‘Just as the gods are supposed to come and go?’ Caswallinos snorted profoundly. ‘In the old tales, fancies of the bards, lad, fancies of the bards. I’ll explain later. Come with me. We need to tell the vergobretes about this river.’

‘True-spoken. We’d best get there today. The horses have to have water.’

‘Indeed. My heart aches for your two friends, but I’m afraid we’ll have to leave them to Evandar.’ Caswallinos paused to look Galerinos over. ‘Ye gods, your arms, lad! It looks like you’ve been fighting a few savages yourself. By the by, did Evandar drive your attackers off?’

‘He didn’t.’ Galerinos paused, wondering if his master would believe his tale. ‘I uh well er I did. Not that I know what I did. I mean –’

‘What by all the hells do you mean?’

‘I cursed them by the power of Great Belinos, just as you taught me. I pointed my staff at them, but then these long bolts of blue fire leapt out of it. Evandar called it sorcery.’

Caswallinos glared at him with narrow eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, seemed to think better of it, opened his eyes wider, then shrugged. ‘He warned me, Evandar that is,’ the old man said, ‘that our magic would be a fair bit stronger here than in the homeland. I had no idea what he meant until this moment.’

‘What did he mean?’

Caswallinos smiled. ‘Let’s find Adorix,’ was all he said. He turned and strode away with Galerinos hurrying after him.

The tribesfolk stood beside their horses or sat on the ground in the little squares of shade cast by the loaded wagons. A fine film of brown dust covered everyone and everything. Children whined or wept while exhausted women tried to comfort them. The horses stood head-down; the dogs were panting open-mouthed. As Caswallinos walked through, people turned to him and wordlessly held out desperate hands.