Carabella said, shuddering, “What monstrous-looking things! Like something out of the worst sending of the King of Dreams.”
Valentine watched in astonishment and horror as they drifted past, dipping and soaring on the wind. Shouts of alarm now came from the courtyard of the temple. Valentine, beckoning Sleet to follow him, ran inward, and saw the old hierarch standing in the center of the lawn, waving an energy-thrower about. The air was thick with the floating things, some of which were drifting toward the ground, and she and half a dozen acolytes were attempting to destroy them before they landed, but several score had already reached ground. Wherever they touched down they remained motionless; but the rich green lawn was instantly burned yellow over an area perhaps twice the creatures’ size.
Within minutes the onslaught was over. The floating things had passed by and were disappearing to the east, but the grounds and garden of the temple looked as if they had been attacked with blowtorches. The hierarch Ambargarde, seeing Valentine, put down her energy-thrower and walked slowly toward him.
“What were those things?” he asked.
“Wind-spiders, my lord.”
“I’ve not heard of them. Are they native to this region?”
“The Divine be thanked, my lord, they are not! They come from Zimroel, from the mountains beyond Khyntor. Every year, when it is their mating season, they cast themselves into the stream of the high winds, and while they are aloft they couple, and let loose their fertile eggs, which are blown eastward by the contrary lower winds of the mountains until they land in the hatching-places. But the adults are caught by the currents of the air and carried out to sea, and sometimes they are swept all the way to the coast of Alhanroel.”
Sleet, with a grimace of disgust, walked toward one last wind-spider that had fallen nearby. It lay quietly, making only the faintest movements, feeble twitchings of its thick shaggy legs.
“Keep back from it!” called Ambargarde. “Every part of it is poisonous!” She summoned an acolyte, who destroyed it with a burst from her energy-thrower. To Valentine the hierarch said, “Before they mate they are harmless enough things, eaters of leaves and soft twigs, and such. But once they have let loose their eggs they change, and become dangerous. You see what they have done to the grass. We will have to dig that all out, or nothing will ever grow there again.”
“And this happens every year?” Valentine asked.
“Oh, no, no, thanks be to the Divine! Most of them perish out at sea. Only once in many years do they get this far. But when they do—ah, my lord, it is always a year of evil omen!”
“When did they last come?” the Coronal asked.
Ambargarde seemed to hesitate. At length she said, “In the year of the death of your brother Lord Voriax, my lord.”
“And before that?”
Her lips trembled. “I cannot remember. Perhaps ten years before, perhaps fifteen.”
“Not in the year of the death of Lord Malibor, by any chance?”
“My lord—forgive me—”
“There is nothing that needs forgiveness,” Valentine said quietly. He walked away from the group and stood staring at the burned places in the devastated lawn. In the Labyrinth, he thought, the Coronal is smitten with dark visions at the feasting table. In Zimroel there are plagues upon the crops. In Alhanroel the wind-spiders come, bearing evil omens. And when I call upon my mother in my dreams I see a stranger’s face. The message is very clear, is it not? Yes. The message is very clear.
“Sleet!” he called.
“Lordship?”
“Find Asenhart, and have him make ready the fleet. We sail as soon as possible.”
“For Zimroel, my lord?”
“For the Isle, first, so I may confer with the Lady. And then to Zimroel, yes.”
“Valentine?” a small voice said.
It was Carabella. Her eyes were fixed and strange and her face was pale. She looked almost like a child now—a small frightened child whose soul has been brushed in the night by the King of Dreams.
“What evil is loose in our land, my lord?” she asked in a voice he could scarcely hear. “What will happen to us, my lord? Tell me: what will happen to us?”
TWO
The Book of the Water-Kings
1
“Your task is to reach Ertsud Grand,” the instructor had said. “Your route is the open country south of the Pinitor Highway. Your weapons are cudgel and dagger. Your obstacles are seven tracker beasts: vourhain, malorn, zeil, kassai, min-mollitor, weyhant, and zytoon. They are dangerous and will injure you if you allow them to take you by surprise.”
Hissune concealed himself behind a thick-trunked ghazan tree so gnarled and twisted that it could well have been ten thousand years old, and peered cautiously down the long narrow valley ahead of him. All was still. He saw none of his fellow trainees, nor any of the tracker beasts.
This was his third day on the trail and he still had twelve miles to go. But what lay immediately before him was dismaying, a bleak slope of loose broken granite that probably would begin to slide the moment he stepped out onto it, sending him crashing onto the rocks of the distant valley floor. Even if this was only a training exercise, he knew that he could get quite authentically killed out here if he blundered.
But going back the way he had come and trying some other route of descent was even less appealing. Once more to risk that narrow ledge of a trail winding in miserable switchbacks over the face of the cliff, the thousand-foot drop that a single false step would bring, those ghastly overhangs that had forced him to crawl forward with his nose to the ground and barely half a foot’s clearance above the back of his head—no. Better to trust himself to that field of rubble in front of him than to try to turn back. Besides, there was that creature prowling still up there, the vourhain, one of the seven trackers. Having come past those sickle tusks and great curving claws once, he had no appetite for confronting them a second time.
Using his cudgel as a walking-stick, he edged warily out onto the gravel field.
The sun was bright and penetrating, this far down Castle Mount, well below the perpetual band of clouds that sheathed the great mountain in its upper middle reaches. Its brilliant light struck fragments of mica embedded in the shattered sharp-edged granite of the slope and rebounded into his eyes, dazzling him.
He put one foot carefully forward, leaned into his step, found the rubble firm beneath his weight. He took another step. Another. A few small chunks of rock came loose and went skittering down the slope, flashing like little mirrors as they turned over and over in their fall.
There seemed no danger yet that the entire slope would give way. He continued downward. His ankles and knees, sore from yesterday’s difficult crossing of a high windswept pass, protested the steep downhill angle. The straps of his backpack sliced into him. He was thirsty and his head ached slightly: the air was thin in this stretch of Castle Mount. There were moments when he found himself wishing he was safely back at the Castle, poring over the texts on constitutional law and ancient history that he had been condemned to study for the past six months. He had to smile at that, remembering how in the weariest days of his tutoring he had been desperately counting the days until he was released from his books and could move on to the excitement of the survival test. Just now, though, his days in the library of the Castle did not seem nearly so burdensome, nor this journey anything but a grueling ordeal.