The Shadow Isle. Katharine Kerr
mouldy smell bothering you?’ she said.
‘Not truly.’ He laid the book down, stretched, and yawned. ‘My eyes are just tired, that’s all. I’ll brew up some eyebright water on the morrow.’
‘You told me that Dallandra wanted you to study less.’
‘So?’ He spat out the word. ‘She doesn’t know everything.’
‘She knows more than you do.’
Branna regretted the words the moment she’d said them. She braced herself for one of their fights, but Neb merely shrugged and looked away.
‘So she does,’ he said at last. ‘For now.’
Branna said nothing. Outside the storm suddenly broke with a patter of rain on the tent roof.
As the alar continued making its slow way north, the rain followed. On the dry days the alar set up only a few tents, but a day or two out of every four it needed to make a full camp and wait out the storm, no matter how impatient its Wise One was. At least, Dallandra reminded herself, they never came upon any lingering snow.
‘A blessing,’ Dallandra remarked to Valandario. ‘I lived with snow for one whole winter, up in Cengarn, and I swear to all the gods I never ever want to see the stuff again.’
‘I don’t think I ever have.’ Val considered for a moment. ‘I’m glad, too.’
Dallandra glanced around the camp. Under a grey sky, streaked with near-black, the men were bustling around, setting up the tents for the night, while the women worked with the herds, hobbling the horses in case the coming storm broke with thunder and lightning. Wildfolk, children, and dogs raced through the camp in unruly packs, always in everyone’s way.
‘We’d better get inside,’ Dallandra said.
‘Yes, come to my tent, will you?’ Val said. ‘I keep thinking about Haen Marn, and we need to scry.’
Now that she was Val’s apprentice, Sidro had already brought her teacher’s possessions into the tent. Most lay piled neatly in the curve of the wall, since the alar would stay in this tent for a short time only, but her blankets and scrying materials lay spread out and ready. Sidro herself was hooking tent bags onto the wall near Val’s pillow.
‘Be there a want upon you to eat dinner now, Wise Ones?’ she said.
‘Not now, but soon,’ Valandario said. ‘My thanks, but I’ll call you when we’re ready.’
With a curtsey Sidro hurried out to leave them their privacy. Dallandra made a golden dweomer light and tossed it up to the tent roof, then sat down on a cushion opposite Valandario with the scrying cloth between them.
‘The thing is,’ Dallandra said, ‘no one’s been able to see the beastly island in any sort of vision. It may be impossible, because after all, it has to be surrounded by water, since it’s an island. But I keep wondering if there might be some way to reach it somehow.’
Val nodded, then assembled a handful of gems, picking and choosing from various pouches.
‘We wish to know about Haen Marn,’ Val said. ‘How may we see it for ourselves?’ She scattered the gems over her scrying cloth. For some while she studied the layout, whispering a word or two at moments. ‘Ah,’ she said at last, ‘something needs completing, something unfinished lingers in the question.’
‘Well, we rather knew that,’ Dallandra said.
Val frowned, then laid a finger on a topaz ovoid that lay on the seam between a red square and a black.
‘No, no, not just the question itself,’ Val said. ‘It’s some small thing, a step towards finding the answer.’
Dallandra reminded herself to hold her tongue and let her colleague do things her own way. Finally Val pointed out a gold bead that gleamed against a misty lavender square in one corner of the patchwork.
‘Treasure in the past,’ Val announced. ‘Or from the past.’ She raised her head and looked off into space, her mouth slack, her eyes expressionless as she waited for some thought or omen to rise into her mind. ‘The scroll.’ She smiled, herself again. ‘Dalla, Aderyn had a scroll that Evandar left for him. It was a set of evocations in the strangest language I’ve ever heard or seen. Do you know what happened to it?’
‘It’s in my tent,’ Dallandra said. ‘Gavantar gave it to me before he set sail for the Southern Isles. Aderyn had wanted me to have it, he said.’
‘Splendid! I had the privilege of working with the thing with Aderyn and Nevyn when I was just out of my apprenticeship. Evandar made sure that it was found at the same time as the obsidian pyramid. They didn’t seem to be connected back then, but he might have had some reason to leave them together.’
‘Evandar always had a reason.’ Dallandra got to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch it right now.’
The men of the alar had finished raising Dallandra’s tent. She ducked inside and found Neb arranging her bedding and goods. ‘Have you seen the grey tent bag with the symbols of Aethyr on it?’ Dallandra said. ‘They’re embroidered with purple yarn.’
‘I have indeed.’ Neb unpiled a few things, rummaged around in a heap of bags, and at last brought out the correct one. ‘Here we are. Why do you want it?’
‘It doesn’t concern you.’
He winced but said nothing more.
As she walked back to Valandario’s tent, Dallandra was thinking more about Neb than the scroll. He was not exactly disrespectful around her, his master in dweomer, but still, at moments his behaviour was a little too free and familiar, as if he’d known her for a long time. In a way, he had, of course, in his previous life, when as a young woman she’d been very much his inferior in dweomer workings. That was a long time ago, she reminded herself. I’d better make that clear to him. At these moments she was grateful to Grallezar all over again, for warning her about his wish that he was Nevyn still.
Inside her tent, Val had put away her scrying gems and cloth. Dallandra knelt under the dweomer light and brought out the wooden box holding the scroll. She laid the bag down, sketched out a circle of warding around it, then opened the box and brought out the scroll. The pabrus had turned brown over the years, and it threatened to split along the creases where it had been first rolled, then squashed into a box. Very carefully indeed she unrolled it and laid it down on the tent bag.
‘I should have left this in Mandra with Grallezar’s books,’ Dallandra said. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten I had it.’
‘It’s just as well you did,’ Val said, smiling. ‘Since we need it.’
They leaned closer, nearly head to head, to look it over.
‘As I remember,’ Valandario said, ‘there’s one invocation that’s incomplete. That may be what the scrying meant. So let’s start there. Ah, here it is!’
Valandario cleared her throat, then read the call aloud in a deliberately colourless voice. ‘Olduh umd nonci do a dooain de Iaida, O gah de poamal ca a nothoa ah avabh. Acare, ca, od zamran, lap ol zirdo noco olpirt de olpirt.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ Dallandra said.
‘Oh yes. Although –’ Valandario frowned at the scroll. ‘Master Aderyn read these out in an odd way. He sounded every letter as the syllable it represents. Ol-de oo-me-deh deh-oh – like that.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense that way, either.’
‘It’s not in Elvish, that’s why. There’s a translation of everything down at the bottom –’
Dallandra looked where Val was pointing. ‘Right! Here it is!’ Dallandra read from the scroll. ‘I do call you in the name of the Highest, oh spirit of the palace on the in the midst of hyancith seas. Come, therefore, and show yourself to me for I serve the same Light of Lights.’