"To administer to the souls of soldiers, eh?"
Tellin caught the ironic tone Dalamar didn't try to hard to hide. "Why, yes," he said, "of course."
But his eyes were still on Lady Lynntha, on her slender straight back and her crown of silver hair. When she lifted her hand to brush a straying curl from her cheek, that pulse in his neck beat harder, hammering until Tellin saw her truly gone into the crowd. The cleric hefted his pack and slung it over his shoulder. Out from his pocket, jogged by the sudden motion, a brightly embroidered scroll case fell. Dalamar bent to pick it up. When he dusted it dean with the sleeve of his hem, the scent of the lady's perfume graced the air, lilacs and ferns.
"My lord," he said, handing the case to Tellin.
Lord Tellin put the case back, looking suddenly defensive. "You are not," he said, coolly, "the only man in Silvanost with dreams."
So it seemed, but Dalamar didn't think his dream would be harder to earn than Lord Tellin's. In House Mystic they respected talent or could be brought to do so. In House Woodshaper they didn't care who you were, cleric or war hero-if you were not of their clan, you still weren't going to marry one of their dear daughters.
Red light glowed in the smallest corner of the brazier. Shadows crawled up the silk walls of the red tent and flowed down again from the top. Tramd dipped his fingers into a black earthenware bowl and drew them out tipped with blood. Heart-blood, he sprinkled it upon the stones ringed round his small fire, painting runes on the stone, hunt-runes, treasure-runes, runes to ensure luck. He was, as Phair Caron guessed, a dwarf. Not here, not now in this tall barbarian shape, but in the far place where he dwelt, in the high towers of his citadel, he was a dwarf. He knew about runes, and he knew about luck, for dwarves count on one as heavily as on the other.
The runes writ, Tramd watched as the fire baked the blood black and small cracks appeared in the marks. Into those cracks he looked-past blackened blood, past stone itself, and into a small corner of the Plane of Magic. The darkness swirled under his glance. He drew a breath in, let a breath out, and the fire danced.
"Come," he whispered, the voice of the avatar shaping the will of the mage. "Come out and be ready. Be ready to run."
The darkness deepened, then shifted, taking form on the distant plane that exists outside the world of the five senses. On the red silk walls, shadows swirled and ran together, small children of that darkness, massing at the top where the vent hole drew out the smoke. In one corner of that mass, something bright grew, like an eye opening.
Tramd held his breath, aware of the eye, not daring to take his attention from the cracks in the baked blood. The cracks closed, a little at a time, healing, but were he to look away, even for an instant-such things would flow out as would chill the hearts of dragons and strike such fear into the souls of mortals that they would run mad. The eye glowed, went dark, then glowed again. The cracks in the blood healed, slowly.
On the wall the shadows took one shape, that of a hound with squinting eyes and jaws agape. The hound's howling wound through the soul of the mage, a long, eerie wail like the cry of a wolf separate from his pack. Fire sighed, and the black blood-runes closed their wounds, shutting out darkness. Tramd sat back on his heels, looking up at the red wall, the shadow-hound seeming to breathe as the red silk moved to a vagrant breeze off the tors.
"Hound," said the mage, his eyes on the eye, his will chaining the beast even as the beast heard his voice. "Hound, will you hunt?" The glaring eye blinked, light, no light, light again. The hound would hunt. "Go down into the forest," Tramd commanded. "Go out and search, and come back to tell me what magic you find, book or artifact, scroll or ring or pendant. Go, and then come again."
The shadow-hound slid from the wall, a waking thing, though not a living thing. Through the night it ran, a child of darkness passing through darkness as fishes do the sea. Down into the forest, beneath the light of the three-quarter moons it ran into the burned lands, the place of charred trunks and ash where now and again embers winked, eyes in the ruin watching the shadow-hound run. In villages it ran, and when it passed by houses where people slept, it passed as a nightmare, a chilling of sleep, a groaning. When it passed through ruin, it ran faster, for nothing remained to find there. Some things of magic it discovered, for this was a kingdom where mages were honored. The hound sensed rings of power, swords whose blades had struck down ogres, whose gemmed hilts wore runes of strength to turn back curses. It found these things in the little towns between the burned borderlands and the straight-running King's Road. Swift as a cold wind out of winter, the hound passed the encampment of a horde of elves, ragged folk, bleeding folk, old women and men and little children who sobbed themselves to sleep. Sleepers woke wailing when the hound slipped round the light of their fires and ran swiftly on.
Beneath the eyes of Solinari and Lunitari and the eye no one saw but some felt, Nuitari's dark moon, the beast of magic ran. It passed the perimeters of many camps of Wildrunners, and some magic it found there. This it did not bother to reckon. Its master would pick the bones of these dead when they fell in battle. One more thing of magic it found, some books enspelled by wards. Three were slender, nothing strongly shining. A fourth, thick and old, was a thing worth noting. The hound discovered these in a cave not far from the city of the elf-king, fair Silvanost, the shining jewel upon the breast of the kingdom.
Satisfied at last, the shadow-hound returned to the tent of its master. All the things that the shadow-hound had discovered and reckoned gained it better than praise from its master.
"For the count of twenty," said Tramd to the fire-eyed darkness, "you may run among the sleeping, out there in the army. Take what you will and do with it as you please."
The hound slipped out from under the tent, red eyes gleaming like embers after a burning. Curious, Tramd stepped outside the tent. In the cool night he watched the shadow run, rippling over the ground, formless now. The cold light of stars shone down. The moons had set. Like red eyes in the night, the army's myriad campfires glowed. He watched the hound course, the shadow running, and he felt his blood stir, the blood of the avatar, the blood of the ruined heap of flesh and bone lying far away in a bed of silks and satin. The hound leaped-he felt it!-and it tore something from a sleeping warrior. Not something to bleed, not something to break. It tore out the soul of the luckless one and four others besides.
Tramd smiled. He sighed and felt the shadow-hound fill up with the essence of its victims, their every thought and wish and dream, each fear, each weakness, the sum of their spirits. He laughed, a low and terrible sound like stones grinding together, as the beast took those souls and dragged them back to the darkness from whence it came.
He watched as the un-souled ran wailing among the army, screaming. He saw them caught, saw them killed, and he heard the ones who did the killing say to each other, "Madness. Just as well they're dead." After all, these were ogres, and sometimes those went mad and had to be killed. In the place where the hound dwelt, though, the wailing and screaming never ended.
In the morning, Tramd noted all the things of magic the shadow-hound had located, reckoned where they were and marked them upon the map he kept in a small silver coffer. He had done this in each land the Highlord's army swept through, a treasure hunter hunting. As he had in Goodlund, in Nordmaar, in Balifor, he would visit all these places once the people had been brought to heel and Phair Caron's governments were set up. He would take these treasures and test them. While he wondered if one of the things found here would be the treasure he had so long quested for, Tramd ate some breakfast, then went out for a walk in the new day. His wondering done for the time, he went to tell his Highlord that a great army of elves was on the move. "And the refugees we sent running into the forest are now only a short journey from Silvanost. They're hungry and ragged and ready to eat the autumn harvest and still look for more from the winter stores.