“I am,” I said. “I am of the heritage of the Gryphon, if not the blood. Kar Garudwyn is my home, just as Car Re Dogan was yours. But you, with your meddling and dabbling along that Shadowed Path, have dishonored what your ancestors built. Look around you!” My shout rang like the clang of a sword upon shield. “Your home is dust and illusion, fallen into ruin because of you and your evil. Look, and look well!”
Slowly his head turned until he could see through the archway behind him to the ruins holding those shifting hallucinations that had once been walls, and courts, and rooms for living. “No,” he whispered. “No…”
“Sylvya was right, Maleron. You trifled with that which should not even be thought of, and as a consequence, your entire Keep, your line, and all that you call yours fell after you departed. There is naught here for you, except to resume the evil you have wreaked for these ages—slaying and stealing spirits. Is that what you want?”
He did not answer, only stood staring wide-eyed. I could see shudders wracking his body. Pity stirred within me for a brief second, but I quenched it sternly. Ten heartbeats’ worth of remorse could never make up for ten centuries of destruction…
The Adept turned back to me, his eyes dull and hopeless. “I see,” he said softly. “What must I do? How can I mend… ?”
“You cannot,” I said inexorably, again quashing those brief stirrings of sympathy. Landisl’s wisdom was mine for the moment, greater and fuller than my own, and the truth was inescapable. “If the Light has surfaced within you at last, it cannot be for long. The Shadow has held you in thrall for time out of mind, and you must act quickly, while you can think with your wits undarkened.”
“I must undo—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It is too late for that, Margrave. It is a hard thing to know, but it is the truth. The most good you can do now for the world is to ensure that you will never again have the opportunity to work evil.”
I pointed to that empty niche waiting by the archway, and violet light flared up from my hand to outline it. The coursing of the ancient Power through me was beginning to make me tremble, but grimly I held that channel to the other open, focusing all my Will upon Maleron.
“Your rest, Adept. For all these ages you have wished for rest from that mad chase. There it lies.”
He turned back to me for a long second, then his shoulders came forward in defeat and he nodded. His eyes, no longer greenish-silver, but leaden, went past me to Sylvya, who had moved up beside me. “Your forgiveness, sister,” he said, reaching a hand toward her in supplication.
“It is yours, my brother,” she said, and I heard her voice for the first time. It was a high, musical trilling, as though she sang rather than spoke.
Maleron turned back to the niche, still blazing with that coruscating light, his shoulders straightening again. Head high, he walked deliberately to that opening, stepped within, then turned to face us. Crossing his hands on his In-east, he closed his eyes. The Power flickered through my open fingers again, almost without my willing it, and as I slowly raised my hand, a wall of the blue stone Landisl named quan-iron grew to cover the niche, not stopping three-quarters of the way up, as for the other guardians, but enclosing the opening completely.
As the wall reached his chin, I saw the Adept’s face for (lie last time—and watched an expression of peace flow across it just before the quan-iron encased him.
“Walled in,” Sylvya whispered beside me. “Forever…”
“No,” I said heavily, feeling a strange, life-ebbing sensation as the Power began to leave me. “He is gone. If we were to open the niche, we would find naught but dust within.”
That trickle of waning strength widened, to become a wash of exhaustion. I staggered under such an onslaught of weariness as I had never experienced—even after Nita’s rescue. Jervon grabbed my arm, slinging it across his shoulders, steadying me. I tried to stand, brace my knees, but it was too much effort to even hold my head up. And yet, within me was the knowledge that the next time I used the ancient Power, it would be easier… though the exercise of such Will would always exact a toll in physical energy and strength.
“Kerovan!” Joisan was at my side, Guret with her.
I am unhurt. I used the mindsharing, for even my tongue was too heavy to move. Must… rest…
“Joisan!” Sylvya’s trill held alarm. “The captured ones… and those Shadow-creatures…”
I looked up to see the hollow, needing, eyes of the boy Jerwin fixed on us. With the other men and women once of humankind, he was moving toward us, past the spot where the hounds had pulled Nidu down. I looked for the Adept’s white beasts, but they were gone. As they drifted silently closer, the sad wraiths were somehow infinitely more threatening. Lowering me to sit on the rocky floor of the Guardians’ enclosure, Jervon stepped toward them, sword held out, then fell back in the face of those pitiful stares. “I cannot cut them down!” he gasped. “I am a warrior, not a butcher! What do they want?”
“They are not-dead,” Sylvya whispered, fear making her voice even more alien. “They seek death, or life—it matters not which. They will steal our lives in their blind search to reclaim what was taken from them.”
I tried to climb to my feet, summon strength to meet this new threat, but even if I had been ringed by fire I could not have crawled a sword’s-length to avoid the burning. Sickly, I watched those hollow-eyed ones draw closer, wondering if I could manage to kill what should have died long ago…
Then a shimmer of red-flecked blackness moved off to my right. The Shadow-creatures were also closing in.
11
Joisan
As I knelt beside my lord in this place that Sylvya’s memory named as The Setting Up of the Kings, he turned his head to look up at me. His face was naught but a misty blur now that the light from his wristband had died out, and his eyes no longer glowed the brilliant amber that had faced down even an Adept of Maleron’s ability. I knew that the Will he had expended to sway the Margrave, convince him to withdraw from Arvon, had sapped his strength as no physical battle could. Even as I tried to support his head, his hands slid along the rocky ground and he lay still.
For a terrible second I feared the worst, but, mind-sharing, I knew that this was simple unconsciousness—not the blankness that is death. At Sylvya’s urgent “Joisan! Guard yourself!” I scrambled to my feet, sword in hand, watching the wraiths and those two Shadow-creatures draw closer to our little band. Maleron and Nidu were gone, but with them went all semblance of an enemy we could speak to, possibly reason with—the hilt of my weapon slid in my sweaty grasp as I tried to think of some way to fight these new threats. Somehow, eyeing them, I did not think steel would avail us this time. And Kerovan was so tar spent that he could not even protect himself.
Beside me, Guret. shuddered. “Jerwin… Cera, it is Jerwin! But I saw him die!”
“He is dead,” I said absently. The insubstantial form of a woman stepped toward me, her hand held out pleadingly. She had the black hair of a woman of Elys’s race. I wondered how long ago she had been swept up into such a hideous fate. “They are all dead, Guret. They want only to rest—” I stopped as my own words made me think . About the nature of death… how it was part of life, if things followed a natural path. Nature…
A thought niggled within me, tantalizing me with a possible solution, then it was gone as the wraith before me reached out a transparent hand and, even though I told myself to stand firm, my flesh shrank away from any contact with it. Cold… wrenching, numbing cold radiated from the woman, and I knew if I suffered her touch, she would crawl within me, seeking to rest in my warmth—
The thought was so repellent that I needs must force myself not to step over Kerovan and retreat. Jervon cried out, backing away from the blackness seeping along the ground toward him—one of the Shadow-creatures. I knew that they were even more dangerous, that they sought to drain our Power, our spirits, as the wraiths hungered for our life and warmth. They would seek out the one holding the greatest Power—