Katharine Kerr - Darkspell

“Now, remember what I told you,” he whispered to the two silver daggers. “At a certain point we’re slipping away from the warband.”

They nodded agreement. With a jingle of tack and scabbards, the warband mounted. Motioning to Jill and Rhodry to follow, Nevyn rode over to the gwerbret.

“Your Grace is sure he knows how to find the farm?”

“A blind man could find it from the instructions you gave. Don’t worry, good sorcerer. We’ll dig these rats out of their holes.”

When the warband rode out, Nevyn kept Rhodry and Jill with him at the very rear. He tossed his reins to the lad and told him to lead his horse along. Since he was needed to go into a light trance, it would be difficult enough to stay in the saddle without worrying about guiding his horse. As the warband clattered down the night-dark road, Nevyn slowed his breathing and withdrew his consciousness from the world around him. To an observer he would have looked half-asleep, his head bobbing in time to the horse’s motion. Through half-lidded eyes he watched the warband and set to work.

First he called upon the Great Ones and saw a beam of imagined light come to him. He meditated upon it, saw it ever more clearly in his mind, until at last it lived apart from his will, a great swath of light shaped like a sword. In his mind he caught it by the hilt and used the blade to trace a mighty sphere of light around and above the war-band. Because of the motion of the horse and the noises around him, it was a hard struggle to concentrate, but eventually he got the sphere solid and the seals—the five-pointed stars of the Kings of the Elements—set at each ordinal point and at zenith and nadir. As soon as the sphere glowed bright, he invoked the great Light that shines behind all the gods and begged permission to meddle with darkness. Slowly, carefully, he withdrew the light from the sphere while leaving its structure until there was nothing left but a solid sphere of darkness, invisible to normal eyes but a shield against scrying.

With the sphere created, Nevyn could bring his mind back to the normal world. He was shocked to find that the warband had traveled a good three miles; working dweomer on horseback was even harder than he’d expected. For the next hour or so, he merely rested, until they were about three miles from the farm. He went briefly back into his trance, called up the light, and let it stream back into the waiting sphere, but he cast a new wrap of darkness over Jill, Rhodry, and himself. Now he could only hope that Alastyr had the common sense to keep a scrying watch. If he had, he would see that sphere, blazoned with the sigils of the light, riding straight for his hiding place. Nevyn wanted him to panic, and to panic thoroughly.

“Jill, Rhodry,” he whispered. “Now!”

They slowed their horses to match his pace, tagging after the warband for a few hundred yards until there was a good distance between them and the unsuspecting gwerbret. With a quick wave of his hand Nevyn led his two silver daggers off the road at a trot. They turned down a side lane that led to the farm by a narrow but more direct route than the road, galloped into a stand of birches, then made their hidden way through the trees. By the time Blaen noticed they were gone, they would be well ahead of the warband.

At length, when they came to a little stream running in a valley between two hills, Nevyn pulled his tiny warband to a halt.

“Very well, silver daggers. The farm lies just on the other side of this hill. Here are your orders. I’m going to lie down and go into a deep trance. You two tie up the horses, then stand guard over my body. It’s just possible that Alastyr will send his apprentice out to try to kill me.”

“He’ll never get past my sword,” Rhodry said.

“No doubt—but if I lose this battle, we’ll meet someday in the Otherlands.” He turned to Jill. “If I die, child, pray with all your heart and soul to the Light that lies behind the moon, and don’t you tell me that you don’t know what I mean.”

Jill caught her breath with a gasp, but even though his heart ached for her, Nevyn had no more time for words. He spread his cloak on the ground, lay on his back upon it, and folded his arms over his chest, positioning each hand on the opposite shoulder. First he invoked the Lords of Light, then lay quietly, gathering strength. Nearby Jill and Rhodry stood with drawn swords. As he closed his eyes, he wondered if he’d ever see them again.

Slowly and carefully within his mind, Nevyn summoned his body of light, a pale-blue simulacrum of his own form, but stripped down to the essentials and joined to his solar plexus by a silver cord. When Nevyn transferred his consciousness over to this form, he felt as if the physical body were dropping sharply away. For the briefest of moments he felt nauseated; then he heard a sound, a click like a sword striking a shield, and he was looking out of the simulacrum’s eyes. His physical body lay below him in a world filled with the blue light of the etheric plane. Since he’d withdrawn from it, his own body looked like a lump of dead flesh and nothing more, but he could see Jill and Rhodry as two egg-shaped whorls of flame, their auras pulsing round them. The trees and the grass glowed dull red with vegetable-life force.

Nevyn rose about ten feet above his body, the silver cord paying out behind him like a fisherman’s line, and looked round. The stream that flowed through the valley might well be useful, he decided, because crossing running water in the body of light is dangerous in the extreme. In the blue light the stream ran silver, and above it drifted its elemental current, visible as a troubled, shifting wall of smoky stuff, a snare if only he could get his weasel into it. He rose higher and drifted toward the crest of the hill. It was time to throw his challenge.

Down on the other side of the hill was a grassy meadow, and in it lay the farmstead, a crumbling roundhouse behind an earthen wall, some sheds, a few fruit trees so old that their life glow was more a brown than a red. Nevyn smiled to himself; the seals were down. Alastyr must have scried out the warband and let them fall in panic. All at once he saw a man run out of the house and head toward a shed with his arms full of saddlebags. He decided that he’d best keep his enemies too busy to think of killing Camdel.

Out of the glowing blue light Nevyn fashioned a spear shape with his mind, then threw it hard for the running man’s dark-shot aura. When it struck, the fellow dropped the saddlebags and screamed aloud. Although his physical body would feel no pain, his trained mind must have felt it searing like a hot iron. With the swoop of a striking falcon, Nevyn flew over the farmhouse as the man ran back inside.

“Alastyr!” he called out in a long exhalation of thought. “Alastyr, I’ve come for you!”

He heard an answering howl echo through the blue light. Like a snake striking up from the ground, Alastyr rushed to meet him. His simulacrum was a huge, black-robed figure, hung with rich jewels and woven with sigils. The silver cord was wrapped thrice about his waist like a kirtle and hung with severed heads. The face that peered through the hood was pale and cruel, the eyes a glitter of dark in a white ghost. Nevyn called upon the Light and felt his own body of light pulse and glow with its power. In answer Alastyr swelled up and blackened as if he would suck up every light in the universe and put it out. The battle was joined: to see who could break up the other’s body of light and drive the soul within, naked and helpless, into the power of the greater forces behind each warrior.

Nevyn struck first with a wave of light that made Alastyr bob and float like a bit of jetsam on the sea. He thrust again, sending his enemy swooping up, but as he followed, he felt Alastyr’s own forces working on him—a decay, as if a thousand claws pulled at him and tried to tear him apart. Much of his will was diverted to keeping his simulacrum together, pulling down more and more light and building it up as fast as Alastyr could rend it. The rest of his power went for attack, a rain of golden arrows and long spears that drove Alastyr this way and that as Nevyn circled round, edging, pressing him with light that beat against the darkness and shrank it back.