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‘And what does the flow of days have to do with one wretched thing?’
‘Don’t you see? The turning of the wheel brings decay, and Time runs like a galloping horse these days. You’re the only one who can grab its reins. Make it slow, brother, for the sake of all of us, my court as well as yours.’
For an answer Evandar merely laughed. A weapon flashed in his brother’s hand, a silver sword held high and ready. Evandar unhooked his leg, leaned forward in the saddle, stared into the black, glittering eyes and stared him down. The fox warrior snarled, but the weapon swung into its sheath.
‘You won’t kill me, younger brother,’ Evandar said, but quietly, lest a grin or a laugh be taken as mockery. ‘Because you don’t know what will happen to you if I die. Neither do I, for that matter, but I’ll wager it would be naught good.’
The fox warrior shrugged the statement away.
‘What have you done to the Lands?’ he repeated. ‘Tell me.’
‘Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you.’
‘No! Never! Not that!’
‘Then I’ll say naught in return.’
For a long moment the fox warrior hesitated, his lips half-parted as if he would speak, then he snarled with a jerk of his reins, swung his horse’s head round and kicked him hard. As he galloped away in a rise of dust, Evandar watched, smiling faintly.
‘You stupid fool,’ he said aloud. ‘It should be obvious what’s happening to the Lands. They’re dying.’
He turned his horse and jogged off, heading for the green refuge along the last river, where his magic, the enchantments that had carved kingdoms out of the shifting stuff of the etheric plane, still held.
Although he most certainly wasn’t the god Meer thought him, Evandar held enormous power, drawn straight from the currents of the upper astral, which shapes the etheric the way that the etheric shapes the physical. He knew how to weave – with enormous effort – the shifting astral light and twine it into forms that seemed, at least, as solid as matter, though he’d also had to master the art of constantly channelling energy into those forms to keep them alive. In the thousands of years of his existence, which he’d spent trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time, he’d had plenty of leisure to learn.
Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when Evandar and his people were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, ‘stayed behind’ and never been born into physical bodies. Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire – or so he’d been told, and so he believed, simply because he loved the woman who’d told him the tale and for no other reason of intellect or logic.
After Evandar left the dead moor behind, he came to a forest, half green trees and burgeoning ferns, half dead wood and twisted thorns. At its edge stood an enormous tree, half of which thrived in green leaf while half blazed with a fire that never consumed the branches nor did it go out – the beacon that marked the boundary proper between the lands he’d made for his brother’s Dark Court and those he kept for his own, the Bright Court. Once the beacon lay behind him, he could relax his guard. As he rode, he thought of his daughter, who had chosen to leave this less than real, more than imagined place and take on flesh in a solid world, one that endured without dweomer to feed it, but one that promised pain. She would be born to a human mother soon, would Elessario, and take up the destiny that should have claimed all his folk. If she were to be safe, there was much he had to do in that other world, the only one that most sapient souls know. What happened to his glamoured lands, or the images of lands, that he had spent an aeon building up no longer much concerned him. Without his concern, they dimmed.
All the green plains, dotted with glades and streams, had turned misty, billowing as he crossed them, as if they were embroidered pictures on a coverlet that someone were shaking to lay out flat upon a bed. The distant towers and urban prospects fluttered and wavered as if they were but banners hung on a near horizon. Only one particular river and the meadows round it remained real, the gathering place for his Court, and it seemed to him that they too had shrunk into themselves, turned smaller, fainter, flames playing over a dying fire.
Yet still they were a beautiful people. Since they had no proper bodies or forms of their own, they’d taken the form of the elves that their leader loved so much, with hair pale as moonlight or bright as the sun to set off violet eyes, grey eyes, and the long delicate curled ears of that earthly race. For the most part their skin was as pale as milk, just touched with roses in the cheek, but some had seen the human beings of the far southern isles, and those who had wore a rich, dark skin like fresh-ploughed earth under a rain. They clustered in the golden pavilion, listened to sad songs played by indifferent bards, or sat in the pale sunlight, merely sat and talked in low voices, their dancing, it seemed, all done forever.
Whether their numbers had shrunk as well, he couldn’t say. Counting the Court lay beyond him or any being, truly, because most of them were like shapes half-seen in clouds or flames, at times separate, at others merging into one another, rising into brief individuality only to fall back to a shared mind. Only a few had achieved, as he had, a true consciousness. One of these, wearing the form of a young page, ran to take his horse as he dismounted. Although the boy stared at him, hoping for a few words, Evandar merely shrugged and walked away. As he hurried through the scattered crowd, faces turned toward him, eyes came to life, hope bloomed in smiles that he would save them as he had before. He doubted that he cared enough to try.
Down by the river, flowing broad and slow between rushy banks, sat a woman with steel-grey eyes and silvery-blonde hair that tumbled down her back. When she rose to greet him, he abruptly saw her slender body as a shaft of granite, hard and cold and real among the shifting forms of the Land. Round her neck she wore a tiny figurine, seemingly carved from amethyst, that echoed her body in every detail. It actually was her body, in fact, once physical meat and blood and bone but transformed by his magic so that she could live in his country. Dallandra was one of the truly-born, a member of that race called elves or Westfolk by men and the ‘Children of the Gods’ by the Gel da’Thae, though they called themselves simply ‘the People’. She was also a dweomermaster of great power, though no human or elven sorcerer could ever match Evandar’s skill.
‘What did your brother want?’ she said.
‘To blame me for letting his territories fall into disrepair. Let him build his own, if he wants them as badly as all that. I’ve no time to waste upon his snouted, hairy pack.’ He walked to the riverbank and looked into the astral water, thick and silver, oozing rather than flowing between the clumps of water reeds and the rushes. ‘No matter what I do, this river remains. I wonder if it will still exist – after I’m dead and scattered into nothingness, I mean.’
‘It might well, at that. Of course, there’s no reason for you to die with your domain. You could choose birth like your daughter has.’
She spoke casually, barely looking his way.
‘I’ve made my choice,’ he snapped. ‘Never shall I go live in the world of blood and muck and pain and mire.’
‘Well, then there’s naught I can do about it, is there?’
His hurt that she would sound so indifferent to his death stabbed like a winter wind. For a moment he was tempted to change his mind, just to spite her.
‘But I do have to visit it now and again,’ he said instead. ‘I’ve started a few more hares upon this field, and I have to go see how they run.’
‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
He laughed, tossing back his head.
‘I hope I do, too, my beloved. I sincerely hope I do. Don’t you trust me?’
‘It’s not a question of trust. It’s just that everything’s getting so dreadfully complicated. You seem, to have so many schemes afoot.’
‘Only the one, to keep Elessario safe once she’s born.’
‘But you’ve a fair number of meats simmering in this particular stew. And I worry about Time, my love. It runs so differently here in your world than it does in mine.’
‘Why must you always refer to that world as yours? I want you to stay here forever with me.’
She hesitated, but in the end, although he could see longing in her eyes, she shook her head no.
‘My place is there, in the world of men, the world of Time.’
‘And the world of Death.’
‘It is, at that. Some things are beyond changing. But after death comes new birth.’
He tried to speak, but no words came. Whether it was beyond his changing or not, he knew that Time and her daughter Death were beyond his understanding. The knowing gave him doubts. Maybe he didn’t understand the universe as completely as he thought he did, maybe his power was far more limited than he thought it was. With those doubts, a distant city vanished from his lands forever, wiped away like a smear of charcoal from a hearthstone.
Although it seemed to Evandar that a mere hour or two had gone by since he’d seen the Gel da’Thae bard and spoken with Jahdo, ten whole days of Time as we measure it in our world had passed for them. They’d been following the stream south, stopping often to rest the horse and mule, since by then they were long out of oats. Although they skirted hills, rising off to the north and east, the river itself seemed headed for lower country. As the river deepened, the banks turned flat and grassy, so that the walking became much easier, even though the forest grew thick and wild to either hand. As Jahdo described the terrain to the bard, Meer remarked that someone must be inhabiting this country, whether they’d seen them or not.
‘Trees hug water, lad. Following this river should be a battle, not an easy stroll. Someone cleared this bank, and not so long ago, either, or second growth would have taken it over.’
‘Well, maybe so. I hope they don’t mind us using the road.’
‘So do I.’
Thinking about what might happen to them if they ran into hostile natives made Jahdo nervous enough to sharpen his eyes. As the river began turning east, he found himself studying the bank as they walked. Here and there he found brown traces of crumbling horse-dung, and the rare hoof-print, too, cut so deeply that the rains hadn’t washed it away.
‘Do you think that’s dung from Thavrae’s horses?’
‘It sounds too old from the way you describe it,’ Meer said. ‘So it more likely came from horses belonging to the natives. Hum. If they drive stock through here, clearing the bank would make sense.’
‘I wonder if they be the same people from the old tales? The ones who helped the ancestors escape.’
‘Those were the Children of the Gods,’ Meer snapped. ‘The lore says so.’
‘But what would gods want with real horses?’
Meer had to chew over this piece of heresy for a long time before he answered.
‘Perhaps your helpers were indeed horseherders, as your lore says, but acting under the direction of the gods or their children, as our lore says. That would make sense, all nice and tidy, like.’
‘Very well, then. If they are the same people, then we don’t have to worry. The tales talk about how decent they were, feeding the ancestors and giving them knives and mules and stuff so they could farm up in the Rhiddaer.’
‘Hum. Goes to show, then, that they were guided by the gods for purposes of the divine wills.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, any ordinary folk would have enslaved the ancestors all over again.’
‘The tales do say that these people were against keeping slaves, on principle, like, just like we are. They thought it was dishonourable and just plain rotten.’
Meer snorted in profound scepticism.
‘Not likely that anyone would believe such a thing, is it?’ he said. ‘Well, not to insult your tribe or suchlike.’
‘Oh, never mind.’ Jahdo had always heard the grown men say that trying to change a Gel da’Thae’s mind about anything was like trying to stop a fire mountain from spewing. ‘Everyone be different.’
Round noon they came to an enormous meadow, ringed with rotting tree stumps, which gave credence to their theory that the mysterious horseherders had cleared some of this land. After they’d unloaded the stock and let them roll, and Meer had prayed, they unpacked a scant dinner and settled down to eat. Although they still had a good amount of cheese, hard tack and jerky left, they’d used up half of their supplies, and Jahdo was beginning to worry about what they’d eat on the way home. Meer, of course, was convinced that the gods would provide for them when the time came.
Jahdo had just finished his meal when he heard a strange sound, a rasping bird-call, up in the sky.
‘What’s that?’ Meer said. ‘Sounds like a hawk.’
Jahdo looked up.
‘It is, truly.’
Far above them, silhouetted against wispy clouds, the bird was circling the meadow. From the backward sweep of its wings and its colour, dark grey on its back, a very pale grey on its belly, Jahdo could tell that it was a falcon of some variety or other. Even though it soared high, he could see its slender grey legs and the mottling on its breast so clearly that, he realized suddenly, it had to be enormous. As he stared up, the bird suddenly flapped and flew, just as if it knew he watched. Yet he thought little of it at first. Toward evening the falcon, if indeed it were the same bird, reappeared to hover above them as they made their camp. Again, when Jahdo stood for a better look, it flew abruptly away.
On the next day Jahdo kept watch for it, and sure enough, in the middle of the morning it reappeared, flying in lazy circles and holding its place even when he stopped walking to scrutinize it. With a call to Meer to hold for a moment, he shaded his eyes and studied the bird, which seemed to be flying lower than it had the day before.
‘Meer, here’s an odd thing! Way above us there’s a falcon, circling round, like, but it’s the biggest falcon I’ve ever seen. It’s way too big for a peregrine, which is sort of what it does look like.’
‘How big, lad? This could be important.’
‘Well, huge, actually.’ He paused, trying to gauge distances and size. ‘You know, I’d swear it were as big as a pony, but that can’t be right. It’s all the clouds and stuff, I guess, making it hard to see. I mean, not even eagles do grow so big.’
Meer howled, a cry of sheer terror, and flung both hands in front of his sightless eyes. With a flap and a screech, the falcon flew away.
‘It be gone now,’ Jahdo said. ‘What be so wrong?’
‘Bad geas, lad, bad bad geas! Don’t you understand? There’s only one thing a bird that large could be!’
‘But there can’t be a bird that large. That’s what I did try to say.’
‘Hah! You don’t understand, then. I should have known you didn’t, when you didn’t sound afraid. A mazrak, lad, that’s what it must be. The most unclean magician of all, a shapechanger, a foul thing, using a coward’s magic.’
‘Huh? You mean someone who can turn themselves into a bird?’
‘Just that. If a mazrak’s spying upon us, then things are dark indeed.’
Jahdo quite simply didn’t know what to say. While they’d been travelling, Meer had been teaching him lore, just as he’d promised. The bard’s tales had introduced him to an entirely new world, one where the gods moved among men and demons fought them, where spirits roamed the earth and caused mischief, where magic was a necessary part of life, as well, to fend all these presences off or to bend the weaker ones to your will. Automatically Jahdo’s hand went to his throat to touch the thong-full of talismans that hung there. He would have laughed all the tales away if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes the being called Evandar disappear. As it was, he was prepared to believe almost anything.
‘Well, it were an awful huge hawk,’ he said.
‘Of course it was. Mazrakir can’t shrink themselves or such-like. They can only change the flesh they have into another form. It’s only logical that their totem animal, the one they change into, I mean, would be about the same size they are.’
‘There be other ones than birds?’
‘Some are bears, some wolves, some horses. All kinds of animals, depending on the nature of the mazrak.’ Meer turned his head and spat on the ground for luck. ‘But it’s bad geas to even talk about such things. Let’s move on, lad. And we’d best travel ready to duck into the forest, where spying hawks can’t follow or see.’
‘All right. And can we sleep in the woods, too?’
‘We’d best do just that, indeed.’
The very next morning Jahdo became a believer in the power of mazrakir to bring bad luck. Just at dawn he woke, sitting bolt upright and straining to hear again the sound that had wakened him. From far above it came again, the shriek of a raven, and a huge one, judging from how loud it squawked. In his blankets nearby, Meer rolled over and sat up.
‘Jahdo, what?’
Jahdo rose to a kneel, peering through the tree-leaves overhead. He could just see a black shape flapping off, a bird as large as a wolfhound at the least, thwacking the air with huge wings.
‘It be another one,’ he burst out. ‘Meer, another mazrak.’
Meer whimpered under his breath.
‘It be gone now,’ Jahdo went on. ‘I hope it doesn’t come back.’
‘Never have I echoed a hope so fervently!’ Meer considered for a moment, then pushed his blankets back with a huge yawn. ‘I’m tempted to try travelling through the forest edge, out of sight, like, but the footing will be too hard on the horses. Besides, if we lose the river, we’re doomed.’
‘Well, I was kind of thinking the same thing, about the river, I mean.’
‘We will pray to the thirteen gods who protect travellers before we set out today. But first, let’s lead the horses to their drink, and break our own night’s fast.’
After the horses were watered and tethered out on the grassy bank to graze, Jahdo knelt by the gear, took out a few small pieces of flatbread and some chewy dried apples, a scant handful each for him and Meer, and laid them on a clean rock while he repacked the saddlebags to balance. Behind him Meer was strolling back and forth, singing under his breath and rehearsing phrasing, as he always did with a particularly important prayer. All at once the bard fell silent. Jahdo slewed round to find him standing frozen, his mouth slack, his head tilted as if he listened for some tiny sound.
‘What is it?’ Jahdo got to his feet. ‘What be wrong?’
Meer tossed back his head and howled. Never had Jahdo heard such a sound, a vast vibrating ululation of grief, all the world’s mourning, or so it seemed, gathered and rolled into this long long wail, wavering and shrieking up and down the bard’s entire register.
‘Meer!’ Jahdo ran to him and grabbed his arm. ‘Meer! Tell me. What be so wrong?’
Another howl answered him, then another, long cascading waves of grief and agony, while Jahdo shook his arm and begged and shouted and in the end, wept aloud in sheer frustration. The sound of his tears cut through the bard’s rapt anguish.
‘Forgive me, lad,’ Meer gasped. ‘But my brother, my brother! I think he’s dead.’
‘What?’ Shock wiped the tears away. ‘Dead? When? I mean, how can you know?’
‘Just now, and the brother bond told me.’
Meer shook the boy’s hand away and stalked into the forest. Jahdo hesitated, then decided that Meer would need to be alone, at least for a while. He wiped his face on a dirty sleeve, then picked up the food again, packing Meer’s share away, eating his own while he squinted up at the sun. Not even half of the day’s first watch had passed since the mazrak’s cry had wakened them.
‘I’ll bet it was the mazrak, too,’ Jahdo said aloud. ‘I’ll bet that ugly old raven does have much to do with this.’
Thinking of the mazrak made him shudder in cold terror. He ran across the open space, hesitated on the edge of the forest safety, groaned aloud, then dashed back again to grab the tether ropes of the horse and mule.
‘I don’t even want to think about that raven getting you,’ he told them. ‘Come on. Let’s go find Meer.’
He’d led them to the forest edge when he remembered their gear, spread out near the riverbank. Without Meer to lift the pack saddles, he couldn’t load the stock. Snivelling and crying in sheer frustration, he led the horse and mule onward. Fortunately, Meer was quite close, standing at the edge of a small clearing. Jahdo urged the horses into this sliver of open ground and dropped their halter ropes to make them stand.
‘Meer?’ He hesitated, wanting to ask the bard how he fared, realizing that the question was stupid. ‘Meer, it be Jahdo.’
Meer nodded, turning his sightless eyes the boy’s way.
‘Meer, we can’t just stay here. Forgive me, but we’ve got to do something. If that mazrak –’
‘True.’ The bard’s voice sounded thick, all swollen with grief. ‘No need to beg forgiveness. You’re right enough.’
‘Are we going to go back west now?’
‘Can’t. I’ve got to make sure he’s dead. In my heart, I know, but how can I tell my mother that I learned of his death without bothering to find out how or why or where he lies buried?’
‘Well, truly, that would be kind of cowardly. She’ll want to know.’
Meer nodded his agreement. Jahdo chewed his lower lip, trying to find the right words. There were none, he supposed.
‘Meer, I be so sorry.’
Meer nodded again.
‘Uh, I’m going to go get the food and what I can carry.’
The bard said nothing, sinking to his knees, his face turned to the earth.
Jahdo went back and forth, carrying armloads of sacks and bags, dragging the heavy pack saddles, staggering under their bedrolls, back and forth until at last he was exhausted but their gear safe in the tiny clearing with the horses. During all of this the bard never moved nor spoke. Jahdo went back to the river one last time for a long drink. He splashed water over his head and arms, as well, then knelt for a moment, looking up at the sky. A few stripes of mare’s tail clouds arched out from the west, but nothing moved below them, not even a normal bird. Shuddering he hurried back to the forest.
This time the bard looked up at the sound of his footsteps.
‘Do you want to stay here for a while?’ Jahdo said.
‘I need to collect myself.’ Meer’s voice was thin and dry, the sound of reeds scraping together. ‘My apologies, Jahdo. My apologies.’
‘It be well. I do be real tired, myself. I just wish there was somewhat I could do.’
Meer shrugged and sighed.
‘I guess you wouldn’t know where your brother is? I mean, well, you know.’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid, no more than I knew where he was when he was alive.’ His voice choked on the last word. ‘But we don’t need scrying crystals to guess what’s happened. His false goddess has deserted him, and in the end no doubt she’ll do the same to all who believe in her! A curse upon her and her evil prophets both!’
‘I guess all we can do is keep going east and hope and pray and stuff. I be so scared.’
But wrapped in his grief the bard never heard him. Meer clenched one enormous fist and laid rather than pounded it against a tree trunk. Under his breath he keened, a low rumble rather than a wail, yet it rose and fell with agony. All at once Jahdo realized a small horror – without eyes Meer couldn’t even weep. At last the Gel da’Thae fell quiet. For a moment he stood silently, then turned and spoke in an unnaturally flat voice.
‘Best be on our way. Whatever that may be.’
All that day they headed more south than east, following the river and luck as well, to make a grim camp at sunset. Meer spoke only to the horse and mule, and in his own language at that, leaving Jahdo to bad dreams of seeing some member of his own family killed beyond his reach to stop it. For Meer’s sake he kept hoping that the bard was wrong and his brother still lived, but some days later they found that Meer’s inborn magic had revealed the truth.