Katharine Kerr - Darkspell

“Of course. After all, since I’ve met him, I can scry him out easily enough.” Suddenly he shuddered.

“It looks to me as if you’ve taken a chill. I’ll put more wood on the fire.”

“It’s not that. The dweomer-cold took me.”

Devaberiel felt like shuddering himself. Realizing that his son was one of those persons that the elves call “spirit friends” always creeped his flesh. He busied himself with finding the leather pouch and tossing it to Ebañy, who shook the ring out into his palm.

“It’s a strange trinket, this.” Ebañy slipped into Deverrian when he spoke. “I remember when you showed it to me, all those years ago. I wanted it so badly for some reason, and yet I knew it wasn’t mine.”

“Do you still covet it?”

“I don’t.” He closed his fingers over the ring and stared into the fire. “I see Rhodry. He’s up in the north somewhere, because he’s riding through snowdrifts. The ring quivers in my hand when I watch, so it’s his, true enough. Oh, it longs for him, it does, but I think me that in the end it might bring his death.”

“What? By the barbarian gods, maybe I should just chuck the thing into a river.”

“It’d only find a man to fish it out again.” Ebañy’s voice was soft, half-drunken. “And he’ll not die, our Rhodry, till his Wyrd comes upon him, and what man can turn that aside? Not even his own father, and you know it well.”

Yet Devaberiel felt heartsick, that his son saw some grave thing come toward them from the future.

It was a long time before the Old One fully pieced together the story of the summer’s debacle in Deverry. When the appointed time for Alastyr and the Hawks to return came and went, he knew that something had gone seriously wrong and sent spies off to the kingdom. Before they could return, however, he received alarming news from more or dinary sources. Over in Deverry the king’s wardens and the gwerbret of Cerrmor’s men swept in and arrested several of their most important agents in the opium trade. Fortunately, Anghariad had been poisoned before she could babble secrets under torture, and Gwenca knew little of dark dweomer besides superstitious rambling that the gwerbret disbelieved. Still, the arrests were a severe blow to the opium trade, which provided the Dark Brotherhood with a significant part of its income.

Yet the worst news of all arrived with the shaken spies. As the Old One had long believed, Alastyr and his apprentices were dead, and the books of power in Nevyn’s hands. The Old One longed to know what Sarcyn had told the old man before his public hanging; he simply couldn’t believe that Nevyn would waste a chance to torture every possible scrap of information out of the apprentice. The thing, however, that made him rage and swear for long hours was that Nevyn had pulled a final trick on them. When in his gratitude at having the Great Stone returned, the king had offered the dweomerman a boon, Nevyn had asked for a court appointment for his “nephew” Madoc, the Master of Fire and a man of considerable power. With him there on guard, the dark dweomer would never be able to meddle directly at court again.

For several days the Old One shut himself up in his study and poured over the astrological data and the written records of his meditations. Somewhere in them had to be subtle indications of trouble that, it seemed, he’d missed before. Yet he found nothing to indicate the role Rhodry had played in disrupting Alastyr’s planes. Jill was even worse, a complete cipher to him, because he had neither her birth time nor that of her parents, whose low status made it likely that the precious times were unrecorded and thus forever lost. Finally he decided that he had made no mistake, that something was at work to disrupt all his carefully laid workings, something beyond his control.

With a sigh that was close to a growl, he heaved his bulk out of his chair and waddled to the window. Outside, trembling in the coolish winter wind, flowering vines splashed scarlet over the garden wall. Two slaves moved across the square of lawn, raking fallen leaves. He barely saw them, his mind ranging far to Deverry. If only he could have traveled there! Impossible, of course; not only was his health so poor that the sea journey would have killed him, but also he was too well-known to the Master of the Aethyr. For a moment he was close to panic. His delicate position in the Brotherhood depended on successful predictions, not advice that led to disaster. What if the other members of the ruling council decided that he’d outlived his usefulness? Then he steadied himself, recalling that he still had power beyond most, that he was far from defeated yet.

He went to the door, rang the gong for his majordomo, and told the slave that he was not to be disturbed for anything short of the house being on fire. Then he settled himself in his chair and let his breathing slow while he prepared for the working. The Old One had discovered and elaborated a most curious form of meditation over his long years that was the source for many of his most accurate predictions. In Bardek at that time, when parchment and writing materials were extremely expensive, learned men had developed a clever system of training their memories to store information. First the subject learned to visualize clear mental images of ordinary objects, say a silver wine flagon. Once he could hold this image in his mind for a moment or two as clearly as if it sat before him, he went on to doing the same thing with more and more elaborate objects, until at last he could hold an entire room, filled with furniture, in his mind and have that room return, exactly the same, every time he recalled it.

At this point he began to build a memory house, imagining and visualizing it one room at a time. Into each room he placed objects symbolic of things he wanted to remember, and these images were usually amusing or grotesque the better to stimulate the memory. For instance, a spice merchant would have a room in his house where he stored information about certain important customers. If a rich woman detested black pepper, say, he would put in a statue of her sneezing violently. If at a certain point he remembered that she had a special quirk, he would mentally walk into the room, look round, and see the picture, which would remind him to bring her a present of some other spice.

Now, it’s obvious that this method of memory training has a great deal in common with the beginning steps of a dweomer-apprenticeship, and the Old One had realized it as soon as he began his dweomer-studies. As a young man he’d been trained as a government clerk, a job that required the memory method above all else, because in those days the very simple idea of filing papers and information in alphabetical order had yet to be invented. In his mind the young slave eunuch who was still known as Tondalo had built a vast archive, into which he could walk and find the location of every important document in his care. Once he had bought his freedom—and made himself a rich man by squeezing every drop of the rich juices of a civil service run mostly by bribes—he had spent an intensely pleasurable afternoon burning that archive down to the precisely imagined ground.

The technique, however, had remained extremely valuable, especially once he’d chanced upon a way to expand it. It had happened, some hundred years earlier, that he’d been working on a particularly difficult problem for the dark guild, a question of whether or not to assassinate a certain archon. As spies brought him information about the archon and the political situation in his city-state, Tondalo had stored them in a memory room, because they were far too scandalous to write down. At one point he returned to that room to find that certain of the objects had changed. A statue of a naked young boy (representing the archon’s true love in life) was holding a bowl that the Old One hadn’t placed there, and next to the boy stood a weeping woman. Spurred by the change, Tondalo saw the solution to their problem: the boy was holding poison in a bowl; the woman was his mother. One of the dark guild’s more presentable members had worked on the mother’s mind until she was furious enough to denounce the archon publicly for his vices. After the mob got through with him, the dark guild had no need to send an assassin to the archon’s door.