“It was a mage, but not exactly. It was like the forest, but it was not the forest.” Themphi took the towel again, then paused once more to ease out another chunk of bloody glass.
“Are you certain?”
Themphi nodded.
“That could be most worrisome. Have you a spare glass?”
“Yes,” answered the younger mage warily.
“Then try to seek out the cause of this…this problem. Once you know, we will tell the marshal that we think there may be a problem.” Triendar worried at his chin. “You had best hurry. The lancers have finished with the hamlet beyond the rise, and the marshal is having his tent struck.” He paused. “Then, it may be best to wait until morning. We could do little anyway…but do your best to discover the source of this…problem.” Triendar coughed, pursed his lips. “One of our mages?”
“Pirophi, I think.”
“He was always a little oversure, but…still. Do what you can.”
Themphi nodded, then turned to Fissar. The younger man had already opened the small chest beside the portable table.
CXXXIII
The candelabra held lit stubs, barely a finger in length. Wax drippings wound around the silver base and seeped across the purple cloth. Three empty bottles stood on the table. So did two goblets, one full, the other empty. Against the glass of the center bottle rested a half-curled scroll.
Zeldyan reached for the scroll again, then stopped, and looked across the table toward Gethen. “Reading it once more will change nothing. There is nothing left of Syskar, Kula, and dozens of smaller hamlets. Clynya is a charred ruin, and the field crops have all been fired, those that could not be harvested quickly before the white demons destroyed them.” She glanced toward the half-ajar door to the adjoining room that served as Nesslek’s bedchamber. “A poor beginning, my sleeping son.”
“Poor indeed,” rumbled Gethen. “I have found less than tenscore in armsmen to bring here to Rohrn for Fornal. Tenscore! Two small companies of the white demons’ lancers would overwhelm them in a morning-or sooner. Tenscore, and the holders begrudge that, even while they demand we hold back the demons.” His eyes fixed Zeldyan. “And you, daughter, letting me go, and then bringing Nesslek to this rundown place.”
“You would have me wait helpless in Lornth? This way I could bring all the armsmen from the keep. You need every blade that can be found.” Zeldyan brushed back a strand of blond hair, and her fingers dropped to the table, then curled around the base of the crystal goblet that bore the etched seal of Lornth, a goblet mostly full of the amber white of Carpa.
“I do not know that all the cold iron in Candar would stop them.” Gethen touched his beard.
“Fornal would claim so.”
“That we know.”
“My brother claims much.” Zeldyan glanced toward the bedchamber door yet again. “My brother…”
“You question…?”
“I do not like the way in which he regards Nesslek,” admitted Zeldyan. “Was it not Sylenia who brought them to heal my son? Was it not Fornal who insisted he was not ill? Yet I feel much discomfort in saying such.”
“You say it, my daughter.”
“I feel it. As I felt it when Fornal suggested to Relyn that he could claim the ironwoods.”
“Fornal said that?”
Zeldyan nodded. “Did you not know?”
Gethen cleared his throat, lifted his goblet, sipped, set it down. Finally, he spoke. “Where are your angels now?”
“I do not know. I will not yet give up hope, not while Lornth stands.” Zeldyan sipped from the goblet she had refilled but once.
“You have greater faith than I, my daughter.”
“Faith? I know little of faith these days. I know people. Lady Ellindyja will die prating of empty honor. Fornal will use a blade at the slightest pretext. You will use arms, but only if all else fails. And the angels, they will keep their word, or die. If they can, the angels will return.” The candles flickered in the momentary breeze that flitted through the open window, bringing the sour smell of Rohrn, a town that had seen better days.
“If they can…” Gethen said.
“We have not lost that from which we would not recover.”
“Not yet, but the white demons are like locusts, or like a grass fire, charring everything before them.” The gray of Gethen’s hair glinted in the dim and flickering light that shifted as the candle flames wavered in the gentle and cool breeze from the open window. “If your angels do not return…we will fight as we can…as we can…”
“They will return.” Zeldyan’s fingers tightened on the goblet, and her eyes went to the partly open door. “They will return….”
CXXXIV
A cool wind brushed his face, and Nylan shivered. Shivered? In the middle of southern Lornth? He shivered again.
“You must drink. You are burning,” said a voice.
Burning? Whose voice?
Images of chaos-fire, order bounds, and the screams of dying men and horses swirled through his skull. Force…force…always force.
“…force…” he murmured. Was it Ayrlyn who talked to him through the darkness? Ayrlyn, who had always been there for him? No-she had been swept under the blackness with him. Ryba? The dark marshal?
“Drink.”
A water bottle was pressed to his lips, and he drank, slowly, through cracked lips and a dry mouth, finally sensing that Sylenia held the bottle.
Nylan opened his eyes, then shut them quickly as lights strobed through the darkness. Propped up against something-packs or blankets-he continued to sip the water Sylenia offered him. Even closed, his eyes twitched with the flickers of light, as though individual powerfluxes flashed through them. Unlike the mass of pain that had flowed through him after battles before, he felt more exhausted than threshed or beaten. An acridity came with the evening breeze, an acridity that carried the odor of burned grass and rock-and charred flesh. Nylan swallowed the bile at the back of his throat.
“Ayrlyn?” he finally asked.
“I’m awake,” came a tired voice out of the light-strobed darkness. “Better than you, but not much. We may have overdone it.”
Overdone it? Probably. Don’t I overdo everything?
“Stop it,” said Ayrlyn wearily. “We didn’t have much choice, and we did it together.”
“It is terrible,” Sylenia said into the darkness. “All around, nothing lives. Nothing moves.”
“Weryl?” Nylan croaked.
“He cried, but he sleeps. He is innocent, like my Acora was.”
All children were innocent, supposedly. Weryl was, that Nylan knew, but the engineer had to wonder about people like Ryba and Gerlich and Fornal. He knew better, but he found it hard to believe they had ever been innocent. He could hear Sylenia moving, carrying the bottle toward the redhead.
“You, healer, must also drink again.”
“Thank you,” Ayrlyn said, after a time.
Sylenia returned the water bottle to Nylan. “Again.”
The engineer drank, more easily the second time, even as questions flitted through his mind.
How much time did they have? Would the Cyadorans turn all their forces against Ayrlyn or him? Or did they think the two angels had perished? Either way, also, the Cyadorans would continue to march northward. Of that he was certain. He and Ayrlyn had to do something. But what?
Even as he attempted to consider the problem, he could feel his eyes getting heavier, closing, against his unspoken protests.
Finally, in the gray before dawn, Nylan pried his eyes open, relieved that he did not experience the shooting, flickering light-strobes of the night before. Carefully, deliberately, he sat up in the stillness, an unnatural stillness without even the chirp of insects or the rustle of grass. His mouth was dry again, and filled with the taste of ashes, a taste that matched the gray of the dawn. His head throbbed with a dull aching, and his shoulders and back were sore and stiff. The skin of his face simultaneously itched and hurt and felt crusty.