"Well, as to that, it's after being Gayrfressa's fault," Bahzell said with a crooked grin. "She's this strange notion that the coursers are after owing me a little favor or two. So after she'd put her head together with the other coursers, the stallions all agreed as how they'd come along and-just this once, mind-see if there were after being a few more of our lads from the Order as they could be carrying along with me."
"They what?" Tellian came half out of his chair in astonishment, and Hanatha set her beer abruptly back down on the table. Bahzell only smiled at them again, and Tellian settled back slowly. He shook his head.
"Bahzell," he said, "I don't believe there have been more than three times in the entire history of the Kingdom when coursers have agreed to carry anyone other than their own chosen wind riders. And I know that they've never, ever, agreed to carry hradani. And you're telling me they've agreed to carry Horse Stealer hradani?"
"Aye." Bahzell took another sip of his beer with elaborate enjoyment, looking as if he'd just said the most reasonable thing in the world. Tellian stared at him, then leaned all the way back in his chair.
"There is," he observed, "a particularly nasty fate reserved for people who get too full of themselves, Milord Champion."
"Aye?" Bahzell cocked his ears impudently at his host, then sobered. "That's all after being very well, yet I've still the little problem of knowing just where it is they're to be carrying us. I'm thinking as how the best I could be doing would be to ride to Kalatha and see what I could be finding out there. Yet there's this-" he tapped his temple yet again "- as is insisting that wherever it may be her trouble lies, it's not Kalatha." He grimaced in obvious frustration. "It's a maddening thing to know as how there's not so very much time, yet not to be knowing where in Tomanâk's name she is."
"Well, Bahzell," Hanatha said, with a slow smile, "you really don't deserve this, after teasing Tellian that way about the coursers, but it just so happens that I'm fairly sure that I know where you need to go."
Chapter Forty-Three
The road to Quaysar ran almost due east from Kalatha, and the morning sun shone brightly into Kaeritha's face as Cloudy trotted briskly along it two days after her appointment with Lanitha. Birds soared and dipped overhead, calling to one another against the impossibly blue sky as they rode the brawny wind gusting out of the northwest, and the endless sea of young grass rippled and hissed musically as the stiff gusts pushed waves across it. The morning was still cool, but there was a sense of life and energy wrapped up in the wind and the high, beautiful cries of the birds, and Kaeritha drew that energy deep into her lungs.
It was tempting to abandon herself to the sensual enjoyment of the new day, but the dark suspicion which had first whispered to her in Trisu's library had hardened into something even darker which cast its own ominous shadow across the morning.
She still had altogether too many questions and far too few answers, she reminded herself. Yet even as she conscientiously bore that in mind, she knew which way the facts she'd been able to test all pointed. What she didn't begin to know was how all this could have happened, or why Lillinara and Tomanâk seemed to have agreed that it was her job to deal with it.
Not that she was tempted even for a moment to pretend it wasn't her job. This was exactly the sort of task which had attracted her to Tomanâk's service in the first place. The fact that she wished with all her heart that someone like the war maids had been available to her mother-or to her-when she was a child only stiffened her resolve still further. She had no clear idea exactly what she was going to encounter at Quaysar, yet there was a stink of Darkness about this entire business. It was only too probable that she was riding directly into that Dark, but it was one of a champion of Tomanâk's functions to carry Light into even the deepest Darkness.
Of course, sometimes the Light failed.
Dame Kaeritha Seldansdaughter knew that, just as she knew how few of Tomanâk's champions ever died in bed. But if that was the price to hold off the Dark which had claimed fallen Kontovar, it was one she would pay. And if worse came to worst, the letter she had dispatched to Bahzell under Sword Seal contained all of her suspicions, discoveries, and deductions. If it should happen that this time she was fated to fail, she knew with absolute certainty that her brother would avenge her and complete her task as surely as she would have done that for him.
She smiled warmly at the thought, then shook off her dark musings and raised her head, turning her face more fully to the sun and luxuriating in its warmth.
Quaysar was impressive.
The temple's original architects had found one of the few genuine hilltops the Wind Plain offered. It was obvious as Kaeritha approached that the upthrust knob upon which the temple and the town which supported it stood was basically a solid plug or dome of granite. It was nowhere near as towering as it had seemed at first glance, she realized as she drew closer. But it didn't have to be, either. The low, rolling flatlands of the Wind Plain stretched away in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and even Quaysar's relatively low perch allowed it to command its surroundings effortlessly.
The old town of Quaysar, which had been folded into the temple community, was surrounded by a low but defensible wall. Newer buildings and outlying farms spread out from the old town along the arms of the crossroads which met beside the sizable pond or small lake at the base of the granite pedestal which supported the temple, and Kaeritha saw workers in the fields as Cloudy trotted past them.
The temple itself had its own wall, which was actually higher than that of the old town and rose sheer from the very lip of the temple's stony perch. That sort of security feature was no part of the temples of Lillinara in the Empire of the Axe, but the Empire was the oldest, most settled realm of Norfressa. Things had been far less orderly on the Wind Plain when Quaysar was first constructed. For that matter, they still were, she supposed. Or they had the potential to be, at any rate; the Time of Troubles wasn't that far in the past. Given that history, she didn't blame the original builders for seeing to it that their temple was not simply located in the most defensible position available but well fortified, to boot.
She couldn't see much of the temple buildings with the wall in the way, but the three traditional towers of any temple of Lillinara rose above them. The Tower of the Mother, with its round, alabaster full moon, was flanked by the slightly lower crescent moon-crowned Tower of the Maiden and the Tower of the Crone, with its matching globe of obsidian. The added height of the prominence upon which the entire temple stood lifted them even higher against the blue sky and high-piled, snow-white clouds to the south, and Kaeritha felt her imagination stir as she realized how they must look against the night heavens when the silver-white glow of Lillinara touched their stonework. Quaysar was far from the largest temple of Lillinara Kaeritha had ever seen, but its location and special significance gave it a majesty and a sense of presence she'd seldom seen equaled.
Yet as she drew closer still, the imagined image of towers, burning with cool, radiant light against the star strewn heavens faded, and an icy chill touched her heart. No silver Lady's Light clung to those towers or those walls under the warm sunlight of early afternoon, but Kaeritha's eyes weren't like those of other mortals. They Saw what others didn't, and her mouth tightened as an ominous, poison-green light flickered at the corner of her vision.
She knew that stomach-churning green. She'd Seen it before, and her mind went back to a rainy day in Baron Tellian's library when she'd told him how unhappily familiar with the presence of the Dark champions of Tomanâk were.