“Aldric? Aldric, where are you? I can’t see you any more…!”
“I’m here, Dewan. I’m listening.” Aldric’s calm voice belied the tears on his scarred face; cold tears, flayed by the icy winter wind.
“Nothing of the Empire for me, Aldric. Not now.”
“I understand. I know.”
“Let me be Alban at the last. Not in the earth. No. Give me to the flames. Fire is clean… and I’m so cold. So…very… cold—”
“
An-diu k’noeth-ei, Dewan-mr’ain
.” Aldric said the words and made the sign quickly, perhaps more quickly than was proper, and then shook his head violently to clear his face of tears and his mind of a thought, a possibility that was beyond bearing. That the words of a curse might just have been fulfilled.
He neither asked for, expected nor would have wanted any help as he gathered Dewan in his arms, a big body, like a bear in all its furs and leather. But a bear whose hunting days were done. Staggering a little under the limp deadweight until he found his balance, Aldric walked slowly and carefully into the Red Tower. When he emerged a few minutes later, his hands were empty and hanging by his sides but he was still weighed down with grief. “He was my friend,” he said. “Whatever he did, he was my friend. And now there isn’t enough wood.” Aldric turned and stared up and up at the slick red stones which were the color of the blood on his gloved hands. “I wish that I could burn it all.”
The voice inside his head was very quiet. “All things burn,” said Ymareth. “Just let the fire be hot enough.”
Aldric half-turned; looked at Gemmel, who nodded, then at the dragon. “True?” he said. Ymareth’s majestic head dipped once, in what could only be another nod.
“True. Only give the word.”
“He was my friend,” Aldric said again. “He deserves a worthy monument: one that Egisburg and the Empire will remember.” He did as he had done once before, and looked straight into the dragon’s glowing eyes. “The word is given. Let us get clear—then torch it.”
There was no one on the streets of the city as they rode out, and none of those who watched from behind closed shutters made the slightest move to obstruct their passage. It was just as well. Neither Aldric nor Kyrin nor Gemmel were in any mood for mannerly dispute. Two drawn swords were enough to discourage all but the city militia; but the crackling nimbus of force which hung about the riders and trailed tendrils of energy in their wake would have given pause even to the Bodyguard Cavalry at Drakkesborg.
Dewan’s old regiment-thought
Aldric on the heels of his first notion. He nudged Lyard to a canter and led their way to the gates.
Egisburg seemed content to watch them leave its precincts; but even after they had gone, the city held its breath. Waiting.
“I don’t care about the snow,” said Aldric as he dismounted, “we’re all lying flat. You too.” Most of this was to the Imperial women, and particularly Chirel who did not care for his high-handed treatment of the Emperor’s sister. “And make your horses lie down as well— like
this
!” He twisted Lyard’s bridle in the proper fash-ion until the big Andarran stallion sank down and rolled onto his side, very black against the snow. “Do it; I’ll help.”
Gemmel was looking at him strangely. “You seem to know exactly what you’re doing,” he said.
Aldric glanced towards him, smiled thinly and shrugged. “If that was the case, Dewan would still be alive,” he said bitterly. “I know how to be careful; that’s all.” Then he lay full-length in the snow, his upper body across Lyard’s neck and one hand over the animal’s exposed eye. His other hand reached out, met Kyrin’s and gripped it tight.
“Aldric, do you really think that even Ymareth—” She saw Aldric’s face in the dimness and stopped, for though his eyes were still huge and shining with the last remnant of weeping for a dead friend, they also shone with anticipation of what another—yes, another friend-might do as a memorial.
“I don’t think,” he said softly. “I believe.”
Silence. Snow drifting down from the iron-gray clouds. Cold and darkness.
And then—
Light! It scored the sky, a column of fire so hot that its core was tinged with violet, so brilliant that the shadows which it threw were edged like knives, and through the black and purple-glowing flecks crowding his vision Aldric saw the Red Tower. It was more than a mile distant, a tiny pin-sharp image that was as red as blood, as red as murder. And it was shimmering. The crimson that was its true color began to change, shading up through scarlet and incandescent orange to a flaring citrine yellow—and at the last it reached a silvery pink-white which forced him to flinch away.
The air temperature began to climb, slowly at first; then it abandoned so gradual an increase and soared. Falling snow became rain, warm drizzle, and after that stopped altogether as the clouds which carried it were ripped to tatters, seared out of existence by the blast of heat rising from the heart of Egisburg. In the sky above the city, stars appeared again.
And in front of Aldric’s eyes two feet and more of snow began to melt, rivulets of water pouring out of it with the chuckling sound of a brimming stream in springtime. He raised his head a fraction, and through a dancing haze could see the Tower—a structure that he knew was two hundred feet of stone and iron and massive timbers—slowly squirming from base to ramparts like a tallow candle in a furnace. Even that brief glimpse felt like staring at the noon sun on midsummer’s day, and it was blazing brighter yet.
The earth bucked beneath his prone body in a sudden convulsion beside which Lyard’s terrified thrashing was like a lover’s caress, and Chirel began to scream—but it was a scream that nobody heard completed. Just as she reached her highest pitch a noise from the direction of Egisburg rolled over them, breaking like a great dark wave of thunder peaked and crested with chain lightning. The very air howled in their ears with the appalling re-verberance of that long rumble of destruction, and in its tingling aftermath they heard, high overhead, Ymareth the dragon’s awesome roar of triumph as its dark wings scythed across the starlit sky.
“Oh sweet and loving—!” whimpered someone’s voice. “Look there… Dear God,
look
!”
They looked. A dome-topped unstable pillar of smoke and dust lifted into the sky above Egisburg, criss-crossed with filaments where yet-burning debris was still falling from the main mass of the cloud. It looked monstrous; evil and obscene, like some gigantic fungus rearing up to spread its rotting cap over the ruins of the Red Tower.
Except that the Red Tower was gone…
Gemmel stared at the cloud, at its shape, and then turned to Aldric with all the depths of infinity in his green eyes. He said nothing, but the Alban thought his face was that of a man confronted by the reality of an ancient, long-forgotten nightmare.
“You believed,” said Kyrin, still holding Aldric’s hand.
He nodded. “But I’m still learning. There are things I’m coming to believe in that you and I have never heard of. And I sometimes wonder if I really want to hear of them at all.” He shivered a little, then turned to help as the horses scrambled upright, snorting and stamping. “Princess, I’m taking you to Durforen, it seems. That was the arrangement with… with your brother. We’re expected at the monastery.”
Marevna an-Sherban gazed levelly up at him with those enormous eyes whose expression he could never read. Framed in the dense dark fur of her hooded cloak, she looked like a little mouse and not like a princess at all. But there was that stillness about her again, that calm which had all the weight of Empire behind it. ‘Then best go there at once, my lord Talvalin,” she said in clipped, accented Alban. For though your company is stimulating, neither I nor the Empire can take much more of it. We have only a limited number of cities, after all.”
They reached Durforen at noon on the fourth day out from Egisburg.
Hethra-hamath, de Marhar
. The eighth day of the tenth month. The eighth day of winter and the Hour of the Hawk. All was silent beneath the silver sunlight, without even a trace of wind to move air that was edged like a razor. There was only that chill, glittering stillness; and, three miles up in the icy sky, what might have been a thread of smoke unravelling white against the bleached blue vault of Heaven.
Black on black against the snow, Aldric reined Lyard to a standstill and pushed the hood of a black military rank-robe. Black on black on black, for beneath the robe he was once more wearing his own sable battle armor and the horse he rode had a coat like polished jet. Three days from Egisburg, and halfway through a fourth. Light of Heaven, it seemed so short a time since… everything. And yet perhaps it was only right and proper that such a journey should be short, so that he could more swiftly give Princess Marevna into the safe-keeping of whoever, in dead Bruda’s words, might be expecting her. And thus more swiftly call a finish to this quest, this exercise in duty to Rynert the King.
It was the discharge of an obligation which had befouled his honor, for all that there were those and one in most particular—he glanced upward with the thought— who still said otherwise; and none could question that it had claimed the life of a man he had called
friend
. Before God, there were few enough with that title; so small a group that he could ill afford to lose a single one.
Aldric could still see, and would always see, the light going out in Dewan’s eyes.
He swallowed down a throat suddenly narrower than it had been—that memory was still too recent and too painful—and swept a long stare across the flawless field of white which sparkled back at him as though dusted with crushed diamonds; then his gaze went out and away and up and beyond. And he shivered slightly.
Aldric would as soon have left the Drusalan Empire far behind him; as the old tale said, shaken its dust from off his feet. But he had not, and he would not. Not yet. There were matters—matters of consequence but no affair of Alba’s king—which required his attention. Personal attention.
As personal as anything confided by a father to a son.
For in the evenings past, after they had found lodgings at farms and steadings so isolated that gossip regarding their presence would travel slowly if at all in this foul weather, Gemmel had spoken to him. Confided in him. Told him such truths that, though often halfway guessed at already, hearing them confirmed and detailed had shaken him to the soul. There had been times when only the gentle anchorage of Tehal Kyrin—Aldric had refused to send her out of earshot—had kept his mind secured to sense and sanity. And there had been times when her nails had sunk deep into his arm while she too tried to come to terms with what was said.
Those words had changed the way that Aldric looked at his world.
His
world, no longer
the
world; for there were other worlds that were not his. Gemmel had said so. One of those was Gemmel’s own. They were words which had fathered, mothered, brought to term and borne those thoughts of enormity, of time and distance beyond understanding, which now made him shiver as he stared at the vastness of the sky. Yet it was not a shiver of fear, not quite. There was awareness in it too; the awareness that comes to eyes newly opened, appreciating for the first time the infinity of light and shape and color which had always lain beyond the limits of their closed darkness. Eyes that now saw a world far smaller than it had been, but a Heaven far, far larger than a man could ever hope to simply dream of…
Below the ridge where he sat, thinking vast thoughts and waiting for the others, was Durforen monastery. It was no longer a religious house, but unquestionably a ruin. Not even an especially picturesque one, although the contour-softening coat of snow on its old gray stones had given it a certain charm. But that charm was offset by its present occupants and incarnation, for the monastery was vivid with the scarlet banners and red armor of the host of soldiers encamped there.
Imperial Household troops, thought Aldric. Even at this distance of half a mile, and squinting through a glare of sun on snow that made his eyes smart and his head ache, he could see—if not read—the gold writing on the banners. Those were never seen outside Kalitzim except in one very special circumstance: when the Emperor himself was in attendance.
“Quite a reception, eh?” Aldric said aloud to Lyard and whistled piercingly between his teeth. The horse flicked both ears disapprovingly; he didn’t care for such whistles overmuch, for they were too shrill by half and more suited to the summoning of dogs. The Emperor’s dogs, this time.
Aldric could see a sudden flurry of agitation in the monastery camp and knew that either his whistle had been heard—not so unlikely in this still air as might appear—or his silhouette had been spotted on the skyline. As other figures joined his own—Kyrin, then Marevna and Chirel close together, and Gemmel as a self-appointed rearguard—the agitation increased and within a few seconds coalesced into a light cavalry patrol heading for them at the gallop amid a haze of churned fine snow.
As the riders boiled over the crest of the ridge in open skirmish order, their line swung through a crescent to a closed circle with the intruders trapped at its center. And then everything stopped, for the “prisoners” hadn’t moved at all but merely sat on their own horses and watched the cavalry maneuver with… interest and enjoyment? Nor was their reaction the only thing wrong. What the patrol had found was not what the patrol had expected: certainly not two girls, a woman, an old man— and a young man who wore the insignia and the arro-gance if not the armor of a cavalry
hanalth
. The soldiers looked nervously from one to another, then at their own officer in hope of guidance; none of them troubled to hide their own confusion.
It was Gemmel who broke the muttering, indecisive stalemate. Perhaps the old sorcerer was lacking patience, or maybe he was just feeling the cold. Nudging his horse forward a step or two, he snapped a very creditable salute towards the patrol
kortagor
—creditable enough for the man to return it—and for some reason he was smiling at some private joke in his own words, even before he spoke. “Take me,” said Gemmel, “to your leader.”