Valdemar 03 - [Collegium 01] - Foundation (41 page)

“Gardener—” he heard himself mutter. “Just at Palace kitchen door—ah—in. Guard—Guard needs help. In th' rose garden, lost the rope. 'Bout—'bout a horse-length from it. Fell an' slipped an' lost it. Got sense to stay where he is—”

He heard Caelen shouting directions but paid no attention. There were still three more. “One 'f them pesty furrin mercs. Headin' for town t' drink. Near th' gate, I think. Damn fool.” He had never quite realized how brutal and how crude these men were until he got a glimpse of their thoughts. His lip curled with distaste as he heard more from that mind than he wanted to. There was a Herald in the gatehouse, with the Guardsmen on duty there. “I got that one.”

He had never done this before . . . he hesitated a moment, then realized that if he waited for Dallen to do the contacting, he might lose some details. He did a kind of mental cough, and—well it felt as if he was tapping on the outside of the other's mind, as if on a door.

The reply was instant, if wordless. Shields dropped; he got the feeling that the Herald's Mindspeaking ability was minimal. But it was enough. He “showed” the other where the mercenary bodyguard was, and got a sense of thanks before the shields came back up again.

“All right. Herald at gatehouse an' three Guards'll fetch 'im in.” He tried not to chuckle with a certain nasty satisfaction. Because the idiot refused to heed the warnings, now instead of spending the storm in luxury with the rest of his fellows, he would be spending it sleeping on a stone floor and eating the trail rations that the Guards had stocked in the gatehouse.

He moved on to number four. “Cook's helper, gettin' wood, slipped an' fell an' the wood fell on 'im. Collegium kitchen, so many people in there he ain't been missed yet.”

He heard Caelen relaying the orders, and he checked briefly back with the Guard and the gardener. He found the gardener already back inside, and three people picking the Guardsman up out of the snow.

He moved on to the last one. “Bardic Trainee, wants t' get snowed in w' his girl; she's a Heraldic Trainee. He's halfway between Bardic and Heralds' an' he just ran out 'f strength. He's set down in th' snow an' he don' know if he don' get up now, he never will. That's all.”

He was about to put up all of his shields again, when—something—brushed against his mind.

His throat closed on the scream he wanted to utter, choked silent with fear. This—
this
was the thing in his dreams, the thing that pursued him, or pursued something he needed to protect! It was cold, it was evil—and it was not sane.

Dallen sensed it in the same moment, but Dallen's reaction was not fear, but fury. He felt Dallen gathering all his mental power, like a thunderbolt, and aim it ready to strike this vicious thing down where it stood—

Too late. Whatever it was . . . was gone.

:What—was that?:
he managed to get out.

:I don't know, Chosen,:
his Companion replied grimly.
:But whatever it is . . . there is something it wants here. Something . . . or someone.:

Mags poked listlessly at the remains of his stew, and listened to three of the most senior Heralds in the Circle debate what he had felt over his head. They had cleared everyone else out of this tiny room as soon as he had recovered enough to get what he had sensed out in coherent sentences, and Herald Caelen had sent for Nikolas and a third man, who evidently had been in the Palace, doing some searching of his own. From all Mags gathered, he was as strong a Mindspeaker as Mags, and a great deal more practiced and disciplined.
He
had “gone looking” for what Mags had sensed, and had come up with nothing. He looked enough like Nikolas to have been his father, although there was nothing in their manner to indicate that was the case.

Now here Mags was, sitting on a cushion on the hearth, head aching, body feeling as if he had been beaten black and blue, utterly exhausted. In that sense of unreality that comes with exhaustion, he was feeling less and less with every passing moment that he had ever sensed anything at all that wasn't some dream-fragment out of his own mind. After all, if it couldn't be verified . . .

“Stop that,” came a calm voice to his right. He turned and stared at the Herald, the Mindspeaker.

“Sir?” he managed, meeting those calm gray eyes. He wished
he
felt like that, so calm, so sure of himself.

“Stop second-guessing yourself. You sensed
something.
Your Companion, who was snug in his stable and
not
half frozen and having hallucinations, also sensed it. All we are trying to do is figure out what it was that you sensed.” The Herald smiled at him. “Storms like this can do some peculiar things. I have heard, although I have never seen it myself, that they can carry with them the echo of thoughts from incredibly far away.”

“Ye thin' that's what I got?” Mags asked hopefully. He really did not want to think that there was something with a mind like
that
snowed in or near the Collegia. Truly, he did not. He would never be able to close his eyes again.

“It certainly corresponds to what I felt near a colddrake, long ago,” the older man said cautiously. “And according to the theory, since they are very powerful, mentally, it is certainly possible for a colddrake's thoughts to have been carried on a storm like this one. Especially if the drake was anywhere about where it started.”

Mags nodded and finished his stew, conscious that there must be no wasted food for as long as they were all snowed in.

“I'm not convinced—” Nikolas said warily. “That's just entirely not reasonable to me. How could the thoughts of a beast from beyond our borders get here? And
why
would Mags sense it wanted something here? That is the part that makes the least sense of all! What could it want here, of all places? No one here is—cursed, or haunted, or—”

It was Caelen who snapped his fingers then. “Of course!” he exclaimed.

Nikolas raised an eyebrow. “Of course what?”

“That's the answer. Those bodyguards—why in the name of all that is holy would they have been so convinced,
immediately,
that they were being haunted?” Caelen smiled broadly. “Anyone else, any other hardened fighters I have ever seen, have always been extremely
skeptical
of hauntings, rather than credulous. Unless—?”

“Unless they have had visitations before,” Nikolas said slowly. “That . . . Caelen, that makes altogether too much sense.”

Mags stirred uneasily. Something about this theory didn't feel right.

“And if one is being troubled by a vengeful spirit, perhaps in dreams, how does one deal with the nightmares?” Caelen persisted.

The third Herald answered, a little grimly. “Steady drinking, usually. And if the visitations were ugly enough, the nightmares bad enough, it might just drive a man to ignore warnings of an impending blizzard to try and get to a source of really strong drink.”

He turned to Mags. “Trainee, did you get any sense at all of whether this—thing's—target was Valdemaran?”

Mags had to shake his head, even though he had some grave misgivings that the solution was this simple. After all, this was not the first time he had had a brush with this thing. And when he had, it had been pursuing something
he
cared about, and he didn't give a crumb about those bullying mercs.

But the answer certainly seemed to satisfy the others. “I think it might be wise to make sure these men have access to either distilled spirits or that herb Healer's sensitivity-deadening potions for as long as they are snowed into the palace,” Nikolas was saying. “Things are going to be tense enough as it is before we dig ourselves and the city out. The last thing we need is for one of those men to go mad.”

“Agreed,” said the third Herald. “And just to be on the safe side, I will keep watch for the revenant myself. If I sense it, I will see if I can find a priest about to cast it out.”

“Well, historically, they never stay cast out for long,” Nikolas observed, as Mags shuddered at the thought of having
that
in his head again.

“True, but by then, they should be gone.” Caelen looked down at Mags. “And so should you, young Trainee. You look as if you would not make it as far as the second floor before you passed out.”

“ 'm all right,” Mags said, struggling to his feet. “Just a bit—”

He blinked as he found himself sitting again. “Huhn—”

Caelen brought over a roll of bedding, which even if it was not his, looked enough like it not to matter. He unrolled it and pointed at it. “You. Here. Sleep.”

Even if they hadn't been the three most senior Heralds in the Circle, Mags would not have had the strength to argue with them. He was just so tired—

And yet he knew that there was no way he would be able to sleep. Not with that—thing—out there. He'd never be able to close his eyes, knowing it was there somewhere. And he still didn't believe it was after the foreigners, whatever it was. Someone had to stay alert, and that someone might just as well be him.

He rolled over and faced the fire so that the three Heralds, still discussing what they were sure was a revenant, would not be able to see that his eyes were still open. He would just rest here for a little while. Just rest.

Just—

—sleep.

T
HE storm had blown itself out, after three days, although only the first day and a half featured the terrible winds that shook the buildings. Mags had slept through most of that, despite being sure he would do nothing of the sort.

Now there was a different problem entirely. The temperature had dropped, making the upper floor of Heralds' Collegium too cold to sleep in, forcing those who had been up there down to further crowd the rooms below. The same was true at Bardic, only more so, since the ancient building was nothing like as weather tight as the newer structures of Healers' and Heralds'. That caused a migration through the narrow slots between the buildings, cut through snow that was waist-high at the least, and further crowding conditions at the other two Collegia.

This was all incidental to the crisis down in Haven. The cold had caused the snow to harden, making it even more difficult to shovel, and once you did shovel out a path, where did you put the snow you had removed? In some places the snow had drifted so deep that you couldn't cut a path, you had to make a tunnel, but that, of course, meant there was always the risk of cave-in and injury. The problems of getting food and help to people, of keeping people warm, that the Palace complex was experiencing were only magnified down in Haven. And then there were the cold-and-snow-related injuries—slips, falls and broken bones, frostbite or even entire frozen limbs, other illnesses made worse by the conditions—Healers were being called for at all hours of the night or day. It took them candlemarks to get down to their patients and back again. The Guard was doing its best to get the snow cleared so life in Haven could get back to normal, Heralds were acting as rescuers and couriers, Bards were doing whatever they were asked to do—and most of the time, no one knew where anyone else was, unless they were Heralds.

So perhaps it was not so surprising that until Mags asked, no one realized that Bear had been missing since the snow stopped falling.

“Ah, Trainee, we seem to be thrown together by circumstance. Would you pass the salt, please?”

Mags looked up to see that he had squeezed in next to the Guard Archivist. Mutely he passed the saltcellar.

“I must compliment you on your research ability,” the old man continued, salting his pea soup. “Your friend the Healer thanked me, and so did his superior later. You seem to have uncovered some intriguing information on herbal remedies that neither of them recognized. And that was incidental to your intended search. Very well done.”