As they mounted up and cantered towards Erdhaven, neither saw a black crow fluttering heavily from the lower branches of a tree where it had been perched. Nor did they notice how it wheeled high into the blue spring sky before flapping with uncrowlike speed towards the north-west.
And the citadel of Dunrath.
Kyrin’s guess was close to the truth; they found it almost impossible to obtain rooms and ended up sharing one in a tavern near the harbour. It was better than Aldric had anticipated, but consequently more expensive than he was prepared for. Even after an hour’s haggling his meagre funds had been sorely depleted when at last they went upstairs.
“One bed,” said the Valhollan in a toneless voice. “Well, at least there’s a chair and blankets…” Aldric disliked the implication.
“I paid for this and I’m sleeping in it,” he snapped. Kyrin shrugged, dumping her saddlebags before the fireplace as a footstool.
Aldric’s irritation evaporated at once. “Kyrin…
Kyrin
.” He met her stare, then gestured at the mattress. “It’s easily big enough for half each. To
sleep
. We’ll need rest, both of us. I know that you… that is…” He was getting embarrassed now and angry at himself for being so. Finally he drew a deep breath and released it hissing between clenched teeth, unslung Isileth Wid-owmaker from her travelling-place at his back and laid the sheathed
taiken
precisely down the centre of the bed. “Half—I promise.”
The girl looked at him, head tilted quizzically. “You promise… like
that
?” Aldric nodded once, fiercely willing her to accept and not make him look foolish. “Very well. I agree… to the arrangement.” She almost smiled and kept it to a twitching of her lips; the boy— she was older than he was, almost certainly—could be horribly intense sometimes. “But why that way?”
“It—it seemed right, somehow,” Aldric tried to explain awkwardly.
“Sometimes, Alban, I wonder if you’re real.” There was no mockery in her voice and when Aldric remembered his own feelings about the sword and the horse, he matched the twinkle in her ice-blue eyes with a shy smile of his own. But when Kyrin lifted Widowmaker from the bed only her sex restrained him from harsh words; no warrior ever made so free with another’s sword and though physically a woman, the Valhollan’s sword made her as much a warrior as any
kailin-eir
.
Perhaps she sensed something or heard his gasp of outrage; whatever the reason, she turned almost hastily and bowed from the waist as she had seen her companion do along the road. Holding out the longsword, one hand already incautiously on the hilt, she asked: “May I draw?” Aldric nodded curtly, realising he could not expect customs and protocol from a foreigner, but acknowledging her untutored courtesy all the same.
Isileth hissed from her scabbard with a whisper as of stroked silk. Without raising her eyes from the cruel beauty of the steel, Kyrin murmured, “Have you used this?” and at once regretted the question, suddenly aware of an aura of cold menace settling over the blade as it slid clear. With a shiver she realised this same intangible grey veil sometimes hung around her companion and wondered, not wanting an answer, which of the two was its true source.
“She has been drawn in the dawn-light, under the eye of Heaven, that she may know me,” intoned the
eijo
quietly. “But used—not yet…” Kyrin sheathed the
taiken
and laid it down, affecting not to notice the slight, caressing touch of Aldric’s hand on hers as he retrieved the weapon and secured it on his hip. “Someone tried to insult me once—said I slept with my sword. I can’t imagine what he would say now.” His small, crooked smile widened fractionally. “By the way, I’m not utterly penniless. Shall we eat now or later?”
“I guessed aright, then,” Duergar muttered, his pale eyes fixed on a thin man in black who knelt before him. The man’s hood was thrown back, revealing yellowish eyes and dark hair which hung in lank tails from perspiration. Had he been a horse he would have been lathered. Until a few minutes previously he had been a crow; he was still lathered. “You are certain of this?”
“Quite certain, lord,” gasped the man. He was having difficulty in getting his breath back and Duergar’s impatient questions were not helping. “From what I saw, indeed, had the boy spotted me I would have been”— he essayed a gaptoothed smile—”dead certain, as they say here.”
“Spare me your feeble humour, man,” returned the necromancer wearily. “I have much to do.” He stood up and the changeling lowered his head respectfully. “You may rest; there will be rewards for this day’s work. Would that all my servants did so well…” He crossed to. the door and then glanced back. “Mark you, no word of this to lord Kalarr.”
“No word?” Kalarr stood in the doorway as it opened, his teeth bared in a hard, mirthless grin. “Whyever not? I’m most curious.” There was a
taiken
in his hand, its point resting on the door-ward’s lips. “I learned that one of your changeling-crows had returned. Yet this”—his sword prodded delicately—”denies it.” Kalarr’s gaze swept the room and settled on the black-clad man, who stared back with fear in his eyes. “It seems he lied.”
Dispassionately, without even watching what he was doing, the sorcerer crunched his longsword past lips, teeth and neck deep into the panelled wall, pinning the sentry like some grotesque specimen. As Kalarr released the weapon and sauntered past his victim, the unfortu-nate man slid forward down its blade until the hilt against his face held him in an eternal half-obeisance above the puddle of his own blood. He took a fearful time to die.
Kalarr paid him no further heed; his concentration was now focused on Duergar to the exclusion of all else. “Enough of this charade!” he hissed as the necromancer groped for the talisman at his neck even though he knew it was useless. “I grow weary of it.” He emitted a chuckle like tearing metal and raised one finger of his right hand.
A whirl of yellow fire dissipated barely a handspan from Duergar’s face, filling the air with heat and the reek of burning. Kalarr gaped; sooner or later every wizard laid a protective charm on himself and he had failed to consider that his erstwhile ally might have done the same. Such things required additional spells to breach them.
By the time he had repeated a fuller invocation Duergar was ready, made bold by his survival after being taken unawares. The changeling scuttled for shelter as power crackled through the room and then his world dissolved into harsh colours and raw, atonal noise. Under the lash of such ravening energies, even wood and stone flared away in coruscations of disrupted matter.
The magics died abruptly amid sparks and vapour. Nothing moved. Echoes of thunder rolled sonorously towards the mountains, while in the shadow of the citadel donjon, ordinary folk raised their heads from the dirt and looked around in terror. Only the sun shone placidly and unconcerned from a clean blue sky.
Kalarr passed one hand across his face and laughed shakily. “It seems we are well matched,” he muttered, then coughed on a wisp of acrid smoke. Shaking with exertion and fright, Duergar sat down on the rippled, spell-warped floor but said nothing. Sweat glistened on his bald pate.
After a glance around, Kalarr chuckled again, and even though it still was not a pleasant sound, this time he seemed genuinely amused. What he had found humorous was the state of the room. It had somewhat… changed. Walls sloped giddily out of the vertical, floor and ceiling were corrugated into waves like a petrified ocean. The changeling was a grayish silhouette scorched into the window-frame where a blast of force had snuffed him out of existence. The whole place had a dizzy, nauseating look.
“If neither can defeat the other,” he mused, turning back to Duergar, “then the obvious solution is to form a true alliance. There is, however, one problem.”
The necromancer looked up at that. “Only one?” he repeated in contemptuous disbelief.
Kalarr smiled blandly at him. “Only one; the source of all others. A lack of mutual trust.”
“You try to kill me and then you say I lack trust in your intentions?” Duergar choked on a bitter laugh.
“Certainly you lack manners, Drusalan. Hear me out.”
“Then talk.” Manners were far from Duergar’s mind right now.
“What oath of mine would you accept as a token of good faith?”
The necromancer looked blank; such a question was so improbable that he had never considered his possible answer. Finally he shrugged. “Suggest one yourself.”
“I was once
kailin-eir
, as much so as the Talvalin boy, before I learned… other skills. That clan—and my other name—is five centuries extinct, but I still have rank, and lord-right over lesser men, and honour when I choose to remember it. Those were never stripped from me.” As he spoke Kalarr went to the door, twisted his
taiken
free of the wall and wrenched it from the sentry’s face, then cleaned the blade with a silken kerchief.
There was a footfall in the corridor and Kalarr swivelled to see who was there. He smiled thinly, then drove his longsword into the wooden floor where it stuck, quivering. “So you alone have the courage to brave this sorcerer’s den, eh? Then come in.”
Baiart bowed low as he entered, ignoring the corpse in the doorway. “You are both unharmed…” he said without any inflection. Kalarr’s smile widened into a cruel grin.
“Such deep concern touches my heart,” he purred. “All went as usual in Cerdor?”
“Of course. How else would it go?”
“How indeed… Tell me,
Baiart-arluth
, Clan-Lord Talvalin, what great oath would a man take if he desired an enemy to trust him? An enemy, mark you.” Baiart stared coldly at the wizard. “I don’t mock you now, man—not with my question, at least.”
“Do you not? Then surely the sun rose from the north today.”
“It may well do so tomorrow,” hissed Kalarr, setting his pleasant aspect aside like an actor changing character-masks. A flicker of something distorted the outline of his hand so that it seemed wrapped in flame. A dangerous glint awoke in his dark eyes as they bored into Baiart’s face. The man flinched, but refused to look away. “Take care, or you might die before you see such marvels.”
“Death no longer frightens me, warlock. Since you wove your spells about me I can wear a
tsepan
without you fretting I might use it. So I must take my ending as a gift; given in hatred, given in rage or given in mercy, my passage to the dark is now the only journey I would welcome.”
“Quite so.” Kalarr looked him up and down and banished the poised spell from his hand. “Then I may give it you in repayment—sometime. But remember Duergar’s special skill, and bear in mind that death here is not an ending, but more often a new beginning to more… docile service. What you desire, Talvalin, is not your passage to the dark but your passage through the pyre. And I seldom like to see a funeral.”
“It smacks too much of waste,” said Duergar pleasantly. Baiart’s face had long since drained of colour. “Now answer my lord’s question.” The necromancer’s courage had returned now that Kalarr’s attention was directed elsewhere. He could defer to whatever scheme was in cu Ruruc’s convoluted brain, at least for the present. What happened later would depend very much on how things developed both here and in the Empire. And on whether Kalarr cu Runic proved worthy of trust.
Perhaps the sun would rise in the north after all.
“The oath is made in blood, for reasons you sorcerers well understand,” said Baiart. “Like all the High oaths, this one is made with a
tsepan
.”
“Give me yours.” Kalarr held out one hand, arrogantly refusing to watch Baiart when the
kailin
drew blade right behind his back. The weapon’s blue and silver hilt was placed gently in the middle of his open palm, despite the savage expression which twisted Baiart’s face. He had tried, anguished, to stab either himself or his undefended target, and his right hand had refused to obey him. Tears of rage and shame trickled down his cheeks, but Kalarr merely nodded absent thanks. “What now?” he demanded.
“You must cut, once only, from thumb to index finger, joining the Honour-scars. But cut shallowly; a man may need to swear many such oaths in his life—especially a man with many enemies.” Kalarr ignored the remark. “Then you must make the mark of your crest in the blood, and the first rune of your name, swear the oath, and wipe all clean with a cloth which must be burnt at once.”
“I see,” said Kalarr. “And if there are no Honour-scars… ?” Baiart gasped in outrage and the wizard laughed at his scandalised expression. “Merely a question, Clan-Lord.” He opened his hand to reveal the three parallel white scars, then sliced the
tsepan
across the top of each.
Both Baiart and Duergar were privately surprised to see that the blood running out was red, as red as the sorcerer’s robes. Using one fingertip, Kalarr drew the crescent and double curve of his crest, the winged viper, and under it the character “Sre.”
“The first rune of
your
name,” said Baiart urgently, “or any oath is void.” Kalarr gazed at him coldly.
“I know,” he said. “Duergar Vathach, give me your hand.” The necromancer started to protest, then thought better of it and did as he was asked. “You are no Alban, wrapped around with honourable codes,” Kalarr said, “but the Empire has a custom of bloodbonding which you should respect. Bloodbond friendship with me, for peace of mind if nothing else.”
Duergar shrugged, then jerked slightly as the
tsepan
nicked his thumb. As the two wounds pressed together he received another surprise—Kalarr’s blood was as warm as any other man’s, neither too hot nor too cold as the necromancer had speculated it might be.
Normally never at a loss for something to say, whether sharp and cruel or once in a rare while almost poetic, Kalarr stared at the flowing blood and spoke not a word. Then with a touch of his hand he closed both wounds, wiped away marks and errant trickles with a kerchief and exploded the wisp of silk into a flash of fire with a single gesture.
“Now that we are allies, my friend, what were you about when I first came in?” he said to Duergar. The necromancer jerked his head in warning at Baiart and a slow smile creased the skin of Kalarr’s face. “Ah… I understand perfectly.” He turned to the Alban and returned his
tsepan
with a sardonic bow. “Would you care to leave us now, Talvalin-arluth?”