Chapter 9:
The People in the Stone
I
As one the boys and girls stepped, their mouths taut, their eyes alight. As one they thrust their “swords.”
All nine held that pose as Hanuvar walked the line, gently tapping one ten-year-old in the leg with his stick as a reminder to lengthen her stance. He nodded approval when she adjusted, then ordered all of them back. They lowered wooden blades, turned, and retreated twelve paces to the side of the ornamental pond before facing forward once more, at loose attention in their short tunics and sandals. Eight looked different combinations of excited and nervous. The expression of the ninth was fixed and determined.
Julivar had thrown herself into training with unwavering commitment, just as Hanuvar had been told his own daughter had done. Was her manner, then, reminiscent of Narisia during the long years they were apart? Would he come to know the daughter of his old political enemy more than his own?
While he strove avoid such fruitless ruminations, the elusive nature of Narisia’s fate had never stopped plaguing him. As the major operations in Tyvol drew to a close, Hanuvar had found himself with extra time to contemplate the mystery of her whereabouts. Carthalo had dispatched inquiries to the island of Surru long weeks before Bomilcar had sailed off to do the same. Presumably if there was word of her, it would already have been found and returned, for Surru was a week’s sail at worst.
He retreated from his unprofitable thoughts and from long habit set his mind on the task before him. These nine children were mostly younger than those given official military training in Volanus, but he himself had practiced these drills at their age, and earlier. Ideally he would have instructed them on brick pavement, rather than garden grass with fountains, birdbaths, pools, and a two-story villa as a backdrop, but the ground was fairly level and these exercises weren’t meant to hone deadly warriors so much as to provide a taste of martial discipline and instill some rudimentary self-defense skills. And, he admitted to himself, to grant him the pleasure of teaching them.
He would have liked to have presented these young people with the traditional weighted wooden swords carried by trainees, but those were either burned or hanging in the halls of Dervan aristocrats. Here, in Apicius, the children had to make due with simple wooden slats to which crossbars had been nailed. They were naturally impatient to hold real weapons. Young people always were.
Apart from Julivar, they had been living at the villa of Ciprion and Amelia until very recently. They were the last of the children transferred through Izivar’s home to their new quarters in the north, and had arrived with their Volani instructors. Izivar had delayed her return trip to spend more leisure time with Hanuvar, and the youngsters, having seen Julivar at her training, had asked to join.
Hanuvar demonstrated an upper block, then advised them to watch their footing as they advanced and raised their sword arm in a parry twelve times. This was routine work for Julivar but she was no less dedicated, which he found heartening.
He had just called them back to the starting line when Izivar stepped out from the villa and onto the garden path, calling to him by his assumed name, the one all the children knew him by. “Decius? You have an important visitor.”
Stressing that the visitor was important was for the benefit of his students. He knew Izivar would not have interrupted without a significant reason. He requested Julivar show them two more blocks and then run them through stretches. The young would hardly feel the need for them, but that, too, was a habit to ingrain. “After, collect and store their swords. They’re to be stowed with the same care you’d handle actual weapons,” he reminded her.
Julivar was often garrulous, but upon the practice field she seldom spoke at all, probably because she imagined Eltyr would not. Hanuvar had seen seasoned Eltyr at practice and overheard their ribald jests. They had been active, athletic women with keen eyes and sharp minds and tongues to match, but most of them were dead, and if Julivar wanted to imagine them as stern heroes he would not gainsay her, for they had been that, too.
Izivar lingered in the doorway to the breakfast nook, where refreshments waited. Traditionally, trainee warriors would have had water, but Izivar had adopted a honeyed melon juice recipe from Amelia and had a pitcher of it waiting. Her smile was distracted as she conducted Hanuvar inside. “They look like they’re enjoying their training.”
“They are. Especially your sister.”
Izivar had not entirely warmed to Julivar’s fascination with soldierly pursuits, but only a pursing of her lips betrayed her ambivalence. She shifted subjects. “Calenius has come.”
Hanuvar could only have been less pleased if Metellus himself had appeared for a visit. “Did he say what he wants?”
“To speak with you.” She led him deeper into the villa. “He was quite cordial. He gave me an amphora he said was of the finest wine, acquired from an estate in Herrenia.”
Hanuvar frowned at that, but expected that if Calenius meant to cause trouble he would simply call the Dervans in upon them. The wine was likely a peace offering of sorts, but why? He followed Izivar through the empty dining room chamber, its best chairs arranged to look into the garden where Julivar led the other children through a down-block drill.
Calenius sat in the shade of an olive tree beside Antires, in the smaller inner courtyard, out of sight and sound of the children at practice. Izivar’s caged song birds and the flow of the fountain into the oval pool at the courtyard’s center were incidental music. The huge red-headed visitor spoke animatedly about someone’s gift for expression, presumably a playwright, for Antires listened attentively. A jug of wine and two cups stood on a trestle table on his right.
The moment Calenius perceived Izivar’s approach he climbed to his feet and inclined his head toward her. Today he looked a barbarian recently come to Dervan ways. He wore a lightweight green tunic with a keyhole pattern about its edges, and soft Dervan riding boots. His was an immense, muscular body, and while that did not necessarily identify him as a foreigner, the style of his flaming red hair did, for it was tied in a long queue behind his head. He retained a slight accent Hanuvar had never identified. “Decius. You look well.”
“As do you.”
“I was hoping we might talk.”
“Of course.” Hanuvar revealed neither caution nor suspicion. He gestured to the bench Calenius had vacated, then took a seat beside Antires.
“I had hoped we might talk alone,” Calenius said.
“He’ll hear about it all later. He’s decided to chronicle my life.”
Calenius smirked. “I wouldn’t have suspected you for a self-aggrandizer.”
Antires let out a bark of laughter. “Him? It took me weeks to get any details out of him at all. He still hates talking about himself. That’s why he prefers to have me on hand.”
Calenius chuckled. He looked to Izivar. “Will you be joining us too, then? I suspect he includes you in his counsel.”
“I have other duties,” Izivar said. “I’ll leave you three to your talk.” She raised a hand in farewell, then left them.
Calenius lifted his mug as if in salute to her turned back, though he did not drink. He turned his attention to Hanuvar. “This is a nice home.”
Hanuvar could not help hearing an unvoiced threat, and wondered if Antires noticed. Calenius’ look seemed to say: “It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
The larger man inclined his head ever so slightly to Hanuvar and continued: “Your woman’s well-spoken, and educated, and pretty.”
This time there was almost a wistful quality to the wizard’s comments, which was well for him, for Hanuvar would not have liked to have heard even the ghost of a threat about her.
“The home is hers,” Hanuvar said. “And so is she, though you’ve rightly noted three of her remarkable qualities.”
“I’ve put you on your defense.” Calenius’ brilliant blue eyes were searching. “I seek only amity. With an offer you’re free to refuse. I play no double game here, and mean to imply no threats.”
“Speak, then.”
Antires shifted, watching but silent. Calenius glanced at him and then continued as though he were not there. “I’ve a problem that needs solving. I’m short on time and require someone capable to assist.”
“Someone beyond your experts?”
“My lieutenants are busy with other matters. I could probably handle this on my own, but I like to stack odds in my favor. I need to retrieve something that’s a few days away. And I think I could rely on you to help.”
Hanuvar had never anticipated this particular kind of interaction with the man. He was uninclined to become further involved with him, but could not help being curious, especially because he worried about how Calenius’ mysterious project might affect his own. “Interesting. What do you offer in return?”
“I may be able to aid your efforts,” Calenius said. “I have money. Material resources. Even . . . other things.” He did not say magic, not even in this private space. Hanuvar knew from his look what he meant.
“Money is always a necessity,” Hanuvar agreed.
“I could help you find your people. I know that’s what’s most important to you.”
Calenius couldn’t know how far along their efforts had come. How specific could his assistance be?
Hanuvar decided to learn. There was one person above all others he wanted to find. And yet . . . Carthalo’s agents and Bomilcar himself were seeking her. She was apparently able to take care of herself, given how well she had avoided capture. There were a few others, sold to some unknown land; one of his own blood was in that category. “I need to locate my niece.”
“Your niece by blood?”
“Yes.”
“Have you other nieces or nephews?”
“One.”
“Have you any clue where your niece is?”
“Very little.”
Calenius frowned. “And the other? Do you know where he or she is?”
“I do.”
“We ought to be able to exclude that one from the search, then.” He swigged some wine. “I can help with this. It would require preparatory time.”
“How much?” Hanuvar asked. “And would you be able to lead me to her?”
“A few hours to a day, depending. I can’t lead you to her, but if she’s still alive I could show her to you.”
“That’s amazing,” Antires whispered reverently.
Calenius did not joke. To Hanuvar’s inquiring look he added: “You would be able to see her, with great clarity, as though you observed her through fine glass. I cannot manage an auditory component, however. Not without an active mage on the other end of the spell. I recommend seeking her during the day so details are more clear when you see where she is. It would do you little good to examine a darkened bed chamber. Be warned that you may not like what you see, or glimpse enough to know exactly where she is.”
This was powerful magic indeed, but Hanuvar did not doubt the wizard’s promises. He had witnessed the result of his sorcery before. “Will your spell hurt anyone?”
“Only you—and all I need is a lock of your hair.”
“Not my blood?”
Calenius shook his head, dully amused. “Blood is flashy, messy, and overrated. It dries out too fast and is easy to contaminate. For this purpose I’d need just a little hair to burn in a ritual fire, so my magics can seek out the right match.”
“My old advisors would have warned me against letting you have access to it.”
“If I wanted you dead, I could have arranged that weeks ago, and you know it. I’ve nothing to gain by harming you at this juncture. Besides, we two are men of a kind.”
Calenius meant this as compliment, although Hanuvar understood Calenius thought him a junior member of whatever brotherhood he proposed. To the wizard he was a promising up-and-comer. “What would you want in return?”
“You’ve seen the dangers of the under tunnels. I need something recovered that’s almost surely guarded. And I want someone to watch my back as I work magic. Someone who’s not just brave and skilled, but who can think for themselves. I’ve a number of competent followers, but those fitting that description are in short supply.”
That explanation sounded reasonable enough, but Hanuvar couldn’t help thinking there was more to it even than Calenius revealed. He pretended the answer satisfied him.
“How long would you need me for?”
“Eight to ten days. Our destination is inland to the south, in the mountains. We’ll be travelling through some fairly remote regions beyond Turia.”
That would leave him out of the final efforts during the theatrical festival, but Izivar and Antires were surely up to the task. It was Izivar who’d suggested an excellent backup plan, should normal means of liberation prove impossible. Still, he’d have to give this proposal serious thought. “How dangerous will the expedition be?”
“About as dangerous as the tunnel. Maybe a little more. I don’t think we’ll face the same kind of guardian.”
“And what is it you’re after?”
“An artifact of my people.”
“And if I asked why?”
Calenius’ smile was reflective, almost mocking of himself. “Let’s call it sentiment.”
“You’re not beyond that, then?”
“It seems not.”
“I’d like to consider this.”
“I can give you today.”
“Where shall I send word?”
“My quarters on the mountain. I have nothing half so comfortable as this, nor as charming a hostess. I’ll have my men watching for you, or your messenger.” He rose. “Oh, and I do not want your chronicler. I mean no offense, but I must insist that you come alone.”
“Why is that?” Antires sounded almost sullen.
“Because I wish it,” Calenius said shortly, like a king unused to challenge. He stood.
Hanuvar saw him to the door. Calenius paused on the threshold and looked back at the cool atrium, decorated with ivy. His gaze suggested he felt a warmth here, a comfort that he might, even briefly, have envied.
Hanuvar walked out with him and waited while his horse was saddled and brought around. “You’ll have my answer in the morning.”
“I’ll look for it.”
Hanuvar watched him go, then gathered Antires and Izivar in her office and sat down with them to work through his reactions. When Izivar asked him what Calenius had wanted, Hanuvar explained.
“Calenius wants me to help him with something dangerous. Like that thing in the tunnels. He says his lieutenants are busy with other matters. I can’t help thinking he’s nearing the end of his project and he needs a few final pieces.”
“So his plan is nearly complete,” Antires said. “Like ours.”
“He said he can use sorcery to help me find Edonia.”
Izivar’s eyes widened. “You believe him?”
“I do.”
“It might be a trick.”
“It might,” he said. “But I think he’s speaking the truth, at least about this.”
She let out a long sigh. “And you also want to learn what Calenius is up to.”
Hanuvar thought this a clever deduction, and acknowledged it with a nod of the head. “I am uneasy about the voices Teonia said she sensed around him. The Volani voices.”
“Voices of the living?” Izivar asked. “Or the dead? If it’s the dead, how can you possibly help?” She studied him, and though he thought his expression neutral she divined his intention. “You’ve already determined to do it, haven’t you.”
“He’s been worried about how he’ll find Edonia for weeks,” Antires said. “She could be in terrible danger.”
Hanuvar thought himself fortunate to have two people who understood his thought process so well.
Izivar’s look softened.
Antires continued. “We’ve known Calenius is plotting something, and he’s very powerful. It may not intersect with what we’re doing, at all. But what if it does? And what if it involves these voices the little girl heard?”
“If you had already decided to go, why ask our opinions?” There was a hint of ice in Izivar’s question.
“I wanted to see if either of you could provide better counterarguments than the ones I’d thought of.”
Izivar spoke sorrowfully. “It makes sense. Your choices always make sense. That doesn’t mean I like them. Do you need to take this risk? It won’t be long before we’re completely beyond Calenius’ sphere. We may never need to worry about him again.”
“I can’t say what we’re beyond, because I don’t know what he’s doing,” Hanuvar said. “And this may be the only chance we’ll get to see where Edonia and the two girls sold with her are.”
Izivar sighed, then nodded with understanding.
“There’s another issue. I’ll be gone more than a week. Do you think the two of you can manage the final rescues during the festival?”
“Yes,” Antires said readily. He’d obviously already been thinking about it, for there was no hesitation in his voice.
Izivar gave the matter more thought. “I’d like to review the details, but, yes, we should be able to handle things.” She had once pointed out to him that she ran a shipping empire with vessels and goods in dozens of ports across the Inner Sea, whereupon he emphasized that he thought her perfectly capable of arranging complex operations.
Her acceptance brought the meeting to a close. Izivar did not speak of the trip with Hanuvar during supper that night, except obliquely as they reviewed details about the final slaves and discussed supplies he would need packed. She expressed caution that Antires was not to accompany him. Hanuvar didn’t mind the last; if something were to go awry he depended upon his friend to assist her with all the rest of their plans.
After dinner Hanuvar retired to his bedroom to read a letter from Carthalo. Through his friend’s stripped down report he discerned the outline of a complicated web of blackmail through which Carthalo had finally gained leverage to free twenty-five fullers, seventeen of them Volani, held in truly wretched circumstances. Much more elaborately Carthalo described the current Dervan political situation, as relayed by his daughter, still collecting information from the capital. New legions were being trained to replace those on their way to Cerdia, and the emperor had been irritated by the return of Senator Aminius from the Cerdian border. Ostensibly Aminius had arrived to personally plead for additional funding and reinforcements, but he seemed much more interested in whipping up sentiment against some of the emperor’s proposed agrarian reforms, then had slipped away to let unsubtle firebrands take up his arguments.
Hanuvar never missed his own involvement in politics, and did not envy the young emperor’s challenges. He hoped Enarius had the wisdom to find his way forward.
As important as it was to keep abreast of the Dervan government, Hanuvar wished Carthalo had described his own efforts in more exacting detail, and then thought wryly of Antires’ frustration with Hanuvar’s succinct descriptions of his own doings and how long it had taken the young man to persuade him to be more revealing. Maybe Carthalo needed a chronicler of his own. It was too bad that he and Antires seemed to irritate one another.
He had just finished watching the letter burn when he heard a key in the lock.
“It’s me,” Izivar’s voice said, and she finished turning it and slid into the room, closing it behind her.
She sat down on the bed beside him and took his hand. She held it for a long moment before addressing him with a blunt confession. “I’m not ready for you to go. Every time you leave, I think it will be the last time I see you.”
“I hope a time will come when I won’t have to leave.”
Her grip on his hand tightened. “We have lost so much. Must we lose you, too?”
“If Julivar were missing, you would do anything to find her, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. It wouldn’t be enough that other people were seeking her, either.”
“Then you understand.”
“Understanding and liking are two different things.” She studied his face in sad silence for a long moment, the lone lantern casting her features in shadow as she leaned forward to kiss him. Soon she was in his arms, and before much time had passed they had helped one another from their clothes and slid into bed to salve their troubles in a moment they stretched out as long as possible.
After, she nestled against him, one leg thrown across his own. He idly toyed with her hair, enjoying her warmth and the press of her skin.
“Do you really think they will welcome me?” she asked softly.
She did not need to explain who they were; she meant the people of New Volanus.20 The subject preyed upon her.
He brushed her shoulder. “By the time we arrive all will know how instrumental you’ve been in procuring their safety and freedom. And I will set anyone right who dares speak against you. Everyone should be beyond these kinds of disagreements now.”
“Most people aren’t as rational as you. That’s probably your greatest failing. You see the best in people who don’t deserve it.”
“I expect them to give their best, and that’s a different thing.”
“I suppose it’s selfish of me to ask you to stay,” she said, softly, and pecked his chest with a kiss. “But I worry for you. We’re so close now to finding them all and getting away. How can I live, without my home,21 and without you?”
He loved that she was strong, and fierce, and deeply caring. This once, she sounded small and vulnerable. “You have become my center,” she finished quietly.
He did not tell her that she had been centered long before him and that she would be centered again without him. He rubbed her back, wondering if it was sane still to drive further onward. Would he know when to end? Did he seek Edonia and Narisia and all the others because he felt guilt? Was he set on this course because when he rested for very long at all he could not help thinking about all that was lost, and all the horrors that had been done, and all the blood that had been spilled? Or had he succumbed to uneasiness about lingering with anyone because those closest to him tended to die?
He spoke to her of none of these things. He turned and kissed her lips, not with fiery ardor, but with tenderness. “I love you. So long as I live, I will return to you.”
She snuggled closer, and dozed in his arms. He did not surrender to sleep until he had felt her relax.
Early the next morning he left for Calenius.
II
Hanuvar reached the slope of Esuvia an hour after dawn, and was conducted to a large canvas tent set in the lee of one of the walls Calenius’ men had excavated. Few of the wizard’s slaves remained in the camp. Hanuvar spotted a number of them digging high along the mountainside, near a flattened outcrop below the final height of the cinder cone. Others labored further downslope, and it struck Hanuvar that they appeared to be readying entrenchments. But who would be besieging them upon the mountain?
Calenius had his tent flap open. He sat in a canvas-backed chair, studying a scroll, and looked up when the slave announced Hanuvar, then stood and offered his hand. They exchanged not the arm clasp common to the people of Tyvol, but the firm closure of palm that Calenius had given him once before.
“I thought you’d come,” the big man said. “I’ll need a lock of your hair.”
Hanuvar patted a belt pouch. “Cut this morning.”
“By the charming Izivar, I expect,” Calenius speculated. “I made some initial preparations, but this will still take me a few hours to ready.” He asked for location details about the nephew or niece Hanuvar had mentioned and then bade him wait in the tent. “Take your ease. I’ve some books that might interest you, and I’ll have my men bring you a meal. I won’t need your hair until the ceremony starts.”
Calenius passed orders along and a servant brought Hanuvar food and drink, then shared it quietly with him, as if to demonstrate it safe for consumption.
Less than two hours later another slave called Hanuvar out from the tent, where he’d been reading the very play of a doomed king that Antires had told him Calenius had been talking about. The ruler’s determination to launch a war to avenge his son’s accidental death wasn’t the overwrought work he had expected, but he wasn’t sure he needed just now the catharsis that the tragedy was supposed to provide.
Calenius was washing his face. Sweat wetted his hair. He paused to pull a fresh shirt over his scarred, muscular chest, and while he finished freshening up Hanuvar inspected the large black bowl the wizard had erected under the tent’s peak. Its rim was incised with hash marks and small pictograms. The earth beneath the bowl and its pedestal was scored in the shape of a hexagon, with other characters burned into the grass along its lines. An unlit gold candle stood at each of its points.
“When I motion you forward, you’re to peer into the water while thinking of the relative you seek. Don’t touch it. Understood?” Calenius asked.
“Yes.”
Calenius stepped to the tray table and pulled the cloth from what proved another candle, this one stubby and black. He lit a taper by striking a spark from flint with what seemed a golden rod, used the taper to touch the candle’s wick, then lifted it. He bent to use it in lighting each of the candles upon the hexagon points. When he had lit the final one, he motioned to Hanuvar, who passed over the hair.
Accepting it between finger and thumb, Calenius began to chant, walking widdershins around the hexagon. After long moments he stopped and lifted the hair far above the flame of the black candle, suspended over the bowl. He dropped the hair toward it.
It should have blown free, or drifted down into the water. Instead each dark strand fell as though weighted, bursting into golden motes of light the moment they neared the flame, then sprinkled down into the water.
With tired eyes, the wizard directed Hanuvar to the bowl.
He decided against crossing the hexagon. He kept Calenius in his sight and bent down across the shimmering liquid.
For a brief moment his own image looked back at him. Then the water rippled as if struck by a stone, and he perceived a sinuous winged serpent drawn upon a large wax tablet. Lines leading from elegant curled lettering pointed to portions of the asalda’s body—the eye, the leg, the head, the wing.
A trio of young women sat cross-legged before the tablet while a stern-faced older woman in a long blue dress pointed at each section with a stiff reed. When she pointed, the young women moved their mouths.
The smaller of the three could only be Edonia. She had her mother’s features, blossoming now toward true beauty, and they watched not the image, but the woman’s pointer, with hawklike vigilance.
All three of the girls wore the same long blue garb, a formal short-sleeved, long-skirted dress. The lettering looked western but he could not fully identify it, although he feared it might be Ilodonean. Certainly the instructor’s coppery-toned skin suggested Ilodonean ancestry, and the reclusive culture claimed that their emperors had mastered the will of asalda.
Hanuvar’s nostrils flared. Ilodonea was incredibly far away, beyond even the desert west of the Cerdians.
The tidy square room itself was bare apart from the bench, a plain wooden door, and the upper half of the plastered wall, painted in a soft red. Sunlight flowed through an unshuttered window.
Just as he was sorting through the information before him the woman slapped the side of the head of the tallest of the girls with her reed, then pointed at her with the implement. The girl’s face screwed up in pain, and then her mouth moved again; once more her head was smacked, and again she seemed to speak. Her pronunciation apparently was not as fine as that of Edonia and the other girl. The instructor pulled back for another smack then turned abruptly; the door had been pushed open behind her.
To Hanuvar’s eyes the man who entered seemed Cerdian, from deep olive skin tone and aquiline nose and shade of hair to the style of sandal and even the flowery hatching about his wide, simple tunic. He expected Ilodoneans might own Cerdian slaves, but would they allow them to dress in their native clothing? The more he saw, the less Hanuvar understood what he perceived. The instructor clapped hands and pointed toward the male slave. The three girls hurried to their feet and formed in single file, the instructor coming after. They followed the man through the open doorway.
“Have you seen enough?” Calenius’ voice was strained.
Hanuvar shook his head no. Where was Edonia being kept?
Now the three Volani girls followed the servant through a hall with polished wood floors. He glimpsed a flowering garden a floor below, and its decorative square roof cornices looked Cerdian too. They passed into a grander corridor, paved with blue marble, its walls painted with blue and gold diamond patterns beneath bounding lions. A symbol of Cerdian kings.
Two grand gold doors lay at the hallway’s terminus, and a man in gleaming armor stood with a spear beside each. From their peaked, crestless golden helms and their curling beards he knew for certain they were Cerdians.
The servant gestured toward the doors but did not enter. The soldiers opened the doubled portal and the girls with their instructor swept into a wide, sunlit room full of a host of Cerdians and advisors from other nations. And there, standing to one side in banded brown armor, stood his daughter, Narisia. His breath caught to see her alive and well. Her hair was uncovered and tied in a tight bun. She was older and graver, and solemn as her sea-gray eyes took in the young women. She was not surprised by them—this, then, could not be the first time that she had seen them here.
A large cloth map lay upon the wide table at the room’s center, and men in plain white slave’s garb were placing markers upon it. A skillful hand had stitched mountains and coasts and deserts, as well as cities, and Hanuvar realized that the eagle markers along the border were legions.
A tall young man crowned with a golden circlet and garbed in purple stood at the table’s head, although he appeared more interested in surveying his wine goblet than the tactical display. The trio of aristocrats beside him, in striped tunics bright as tropical bird plumage, studded with be-gemmed rings, looked more curious.
This, then, was almost certainly the Cerdian capital, and likely the palace.
Narisia advanced to the table to make some point with a finger jabbed at the map. In the years since Hanuvar had seen her last she had apparently grown no less outspoken. She pushed a brown marker from further south up toward the border, and brought another legion down from the north.
She was advising action the others appeared reluctant to take. How long had she been on the Cerdian staff, and how was it that no Dervan spies had caught wind of it?
Edonia and the other girls halted beside a tall man in his thirties, a fellow in the sweeping silks of an Ilodonean, his skin coppery, his slim nose high and proud, his eyebrows thin and arched. He said something that attracted the king’s attention, and motioned the girls to speak. Whatever it was they said, it was in unison, and while they talked, he shifted another marker from the map edge to its center, a ribbony figurine with wings.
At the same moment Hanuvar recognized it for an asalda, the Ilodonean’s eyes seemed to light with gold from within and Hanuvar could have sworn he looked right through the pool and out at them.
Calenius snuffed the candle and the water sloshed as if it had been bumped from below. An icy wind blew out each of the remaining candles. He let out a heavy breath. “I could hold it no longer. You saw your niece, though, didn’t you?”
“I learned that she lives, and where. But I’m left with a host of questions.”
“It’s always the way. And I cannot answer any except to say the Ilodonean felt our magics. But then he appears to be the sorcerer to a king, and must have been chosen for his knowledge.”
Hanuvar nodded slowly. His niece lived; moreover, her companions did, and his own daughter held a prominent position in the Cerdian court, and was surely working to aid the girls. He could wish that Narisia was not involved in the war with Derva, but he was thrilled simply to have seen her and Edonia both. In a word, the moment had been miraculous. He looked across the water at the man in front of him. “You have held to your part. I will hold to mine.”
III
Hanuvar drafted a coded missive to Antires, writing that both daughter and niece were alive in Cerdia’s capital, and asked him to convey that news, along with his love, to Izivar. One of Calenius’ slaves trotted off to deliver it, and then Hanuvar and the big wizard were riding away, leading a single packhorse.
They skirted the edge of Apicius but did not stop, riding south along the main road toward Turia. The skies were clear, but the sun’s warmth had begun to ease as summer waned. They passed carts laden with goods and passengers headed both north and south.
For the most part they rode in file. Calenius seemed disinterested in speech and Hanuvar contemplated the steps that lay ahead. The Cerdians, with Ilodonean help, apparently thought to deploy an asalda to fight the Dervans. How they hoped to command one with three Volani girls trained only to aid them was yet another puzzle he couldn’t solve without more information.
His daughter advised the Cerdian king, or at least attempted to, about their brewing war with Derva. How much of her life had she invested in a conflict for a people not her own? How likely was he to convince her to leave for New Volanus? She had known of its existence. That she had not come seeking it suggested her heart was turned toward vengeance. But then she had lost not just her city and father and husband, but her Eltyr sisters, and her children. She might well feel she had no other recourse.
In the afternoon Calenius slowed at last and Hanuvar caught up to him. The sorcerer’s black horse was a few hands higher than Hanuvar’s, and the man gazed down from his saddle. His vivid blue eyes were bagged with fatigue. He had forged on despite spell work that had exhausted him.
“We’ll stay the first night at an inn. After that we’ll be in the wilderness.”
Hanuvar nodded.
The reaction appeared to amuse Calenius. “I know you’re curious, but you’re not asking me anything.”
“You could tell me what you did for the Dervans during the siege of Volanus.”
Calenius looked almost disappointed. “What I was paid to do. I’m a mercenary. And my circumstances at the time required cooperation.”
“That’s vague.”
“It was a war. I have nothing against your people, but my needs set me against them. You don’t want details.”
He did, but he didn’t press. “What are your circumstances now?”
“Now I’m on my own, and beholden to no one. I don’t think the revenant legate holds me in high regard. But you can’t always choose your enemies.”
“You don’t seem troubled about it.”
“I have more pressing concerns.”
Hanuvar understood that level of focus, though not its target. “Are those concerns anything I should worry about?”
Calenius’ sidelong look was appraising. What it was meant to communicate was uncertain. The sooner Hanuvar and his people were away from Calenius and this region, the better.
They stopped late that evening at a village lying at a crossroads. Calenius paid for two separate rooms, ordered food sent to his chamber, and went upstairs to eat it. Hanuvar saw to his own horse and watched for a time as the stableboys cared for the other two, then ate at one of the outside tables, away from the dining hall crowded by boisterous locals.
There amongst the eight outside tables were young lovers and travelers and older people like himself more interested in quiet. He finished the simple Dervan fare, then walked about the little settlement as though curious about his surroundings. In reality he was assessing the best points of attack upon the inn, the best routes for a swift departure, and any potential conflicts, more out of habit than any real need. Near the end of his circuit he passed the stone outbuilding where the cooking took place and spotted a dark furred shape sitting expectantly beside a shuttered window. It was a dog, its snout pointed toward the sill.
The animal turned to regard him and he approached slowly. It was a young male mastiff with expressive orange-brown eyes and calm demeanor. The animal sniffed at him, thumped its tail, then returned its attention to the window. Hanuvar now perceived that someone had placed a soup bone there. At shoulder height it was too far for the animal to reach. Had someone left it to cool?
Hanuvar didn’t see anyone. He looked down at the dog. “Lie down.”
The mastiff considered him only briefly before obeying the order. Impressed, Hanuvar tried a second command. “Sit.”
Immediately the dog rose onto his haunches.
Hanuvar removed the browned soup bone, only a little warm to the touch, and handed it down. “Good dog.”
The mastiff accepted the bone without snatching it, and Hanuvar scratched the animal’s head. The dog wagged his tail, trotted a few feet to the right, and plopped down to gnaw on his treasure.
“That’s my dog.”
Hanuvar hadn’t heard the gravelly voiced man come up behind him. He turned to find a slender figure a few paces to his side, mostly hidden by shadow. He smelled of dogs, and sweat and road dust.
“You have a well-mannered dog,” Hanuvar said.
The stranger still seemed inclined to be critical. “You gave him a bone?”
“He asked politely.”
That answer must have pleased the stranger better, for his next question was more neutral. “You like dogs?”
“Better than some people.”
“They’re more dependable,” the stranger agreed. “You spoke to him like a man who’s trained them.”
“Never had the pleasure. I’ve trained horses.”
The stranger stepped nearer. He was rangy, one of those whipcord-thin men seasoned and strengthened like old leather. His voice was low. “You’re travelling with the big man?”
There was no question who he was referring to. “I am.”
The houndman looked down at his animal, happily gnawing away, then back to Hanuvar. “That may prove bad for your health.”
“What makes you think that?”
He shrugged high shoulders. “You might do better to find a different employer.”
Whoever this man was, then, he didn’t know anything about Hanuvar or his goals. “I’m honor bound, after he did me a favor,” he explained.
“Honor bound.” The houndman repeated the words as if unaccustomed to hearing them. He sounded almost disgruntled. “Well, enjoy your evening.” He whistled once to the dog and it climbed to its feet, bone between its teeth. The dog fell in at his side and the two left together. It was only as they drew closer to the light of the lanterns at the outdoor tables that Hanuvar noted the gleam of an opal on the ring of the houndman’s hand. He had taken a very similar ring from the severed hand of a revenant earlier that summer. He carried it still in one of his belt pouches.
If revenants were active in the area, they did not make themselves known that night, or in the morning, and soon he and Calenius were riding west along an old dirt road and then southwest along a rutted trail scarcely wide enough to accommodate a cart. They wound their way just east of the foothills of the spiny Vertigines range, whose pine-girt upper slopes rose above the morning mist.
After the first few hours Hanuvar occasionally noted a large sable mastiff trotting to their rear. Then, near noon, Calenius commented he had glimpsed one stepping out of some woodland ahead.
“This summer I met a revenant with a dog,” Hanuvar said.
“I’m not worried about the revenants. They gave me leave to work my magics unmolested.”
“That was before things went badly with the false Hanuvar, wasn’t it?”
Calenius scoffed. “If the revenants wanted me, they’d come for me.”
“In your base of operations, surrounded by your men?”
Hanuvar’s observation gave Calenius pause. “I don’t have time for this,” he grumbled.
He scanned the ground ahead and to the side, and veered for a bushy knoll rising above the scrubby grassland. Hanuvar supposed it was a decent enough defensible position, but hardly ideal.
Calenius arrived at its base, dismounted, and continued to scan it as he led his horse up.
“What are we doing?” Hanuvar asked.
“Drawing them out.”
Hanuvar didn’t like that Calenius passed the reins of his own animal over to him when they reached the height.
The hilltop was just under a hundred paces in circumference, and heavy with scrubby brush and weed trees. The south and eastern slopes were steep drop-offs.
Calenius finished his brief survey then opened his saddlebag. “This will take a little while. Picket the horses in the center.”
Hanuvar didn’t care for the thought Calenius would be working more sorcery, nor did he like his companion’s mysteries, and he had to admit to himself that he chafed at being treated as a lackey. Despite some playacting along those lines, he hadn’t truly been a line soldier for decades now. He reminded himself that he had learned that both Edonia and Narisia were alive and healthy, and discovered their location. Surely that had been worth enduring the sorcerer’s companionship for a few days.
He kept watch while Calenius drew in the dirt, measured out powders, notched candles, and quietly chanted.
Before very much longer Hanuvar saw dogs, half again the size of the young one to whom he’d given the bone. They were heavy and various shades of brown and watched from within the distant tree line. While he had not observed the color of the animal that had attacked him and Ciprion on the beach in the dark, these seemed a similar sort. Whatever the houndman intended in the end, now he seemed merely to be monitoring.
The blinding white sun sank slowly. After more than an hour, Calenius withdrew a flat blackened stone from a scarlet sackcloth. The size of a hand shield, its shining top had been painted with a scarlet hexagon. The mage traced its surface, muttering, then stood and stretched his back. He took a long swig from his wineskin.
Hanuvar’s eyes were drawn to the stone even as they recoiled from it. The briefest glance chilled him in a way he’d felt only when in the presence of things from other realms, around creatures that had hungered for souls and lives and blood.
Calenius saw the direction of his gaze. “Stand ready. I’m going to call in the dogs. There’s seven of them.”
“What do you mean ‘call them in’?”
“I’ll bring them to me, even if they don’t want to come. They won’t like it. But whoever’s behind it won’t be able to follow us after.”
The big sorcerer capped his wineskin and restored it to his belt. He laid out his bow and strung it, then planted arrows in the ground beside him. Finally, he pulled the stubby wand from his belt once more, drew in the air, and that sense of wrongness, of revulsion and discomfort, rippled out from him in a wave. Hanuvar bared his teeth but kept his place. He loosed his sword in its scabbard.
A thick brown dog shape broke cover from the right, only a few hundred feet out, and charged the hill. Another darted out of the woods further south and raced for their position.
A human whistled from somewhere out of sight even as a third dog broke cover to the west and hurried for them.
Loping toward the slope, the first bared teeth. Calenius’ bow creaked as he pulled the string back and let fly. The shaft struck through the dog’s head. The mastiff tumbled spastically over its front legs and crashed to a halt against a low bush.
Calenius had already nocked a second arrow and sent it flying. His shot found a dog’s breast. It dropped on suddenly useless legs, whimpering fitfully for a time before falling still.
He drew a bead on the third dog but held fire as it closed. Hanuvar watched, wishing for the animal to veer away. Its eyes were wide and fearful and it whined; it did not want to be here, in the open, running against its will.
Might Calenius use this power on people? It was chilling enough to see its effects on dogs. Hanuvar fingered the ring in his pouch but did not slip it onto his hand, for he was not certain what it might do, or whether it would be of use.
A man cried out from under cover to the south, whistled, then called desperately. His voice was thick with anguish. Hanuvar bit back a plea for Calenius to stop. These were war dogs, and the houndsman had almost certainly been dispatched to hunt them.
The animal bayed once, a sound cut short as Calenius put an arrow through its gullet. Its momentum sent it tumbling end over end until it lay twitching.
“Bastard!” the houndsman shouted.
“Come after me again and I’ll kill the rest!” Calenius cried.
There came no answer.
“He’s leashed the others.” Calenius spoke like he mouthed a curse. He slashed the air as if cutting an invisible line and some of the tension in the air faded, but normalcy was unrestored until he had bagged the black stone.
“Let’s ride,” Calenius said.
Hanuvar was happy to be gone from there. Some of his allies had worked with warhounds, and while he’d seen how effective they could be in combat, he hated to see them slain, in the same way he hated to see the death of elephants or horses. All the animals wanted was to follow their training and please their masters. They had no concept of the greater stakes and the alliances of the men who brought them to battle.
But then that could be said of many of the soldiers who filled out the world’s armies.
Calenius led them deeper into the wilds. If the hounds still followed, Hanuvar did not see them.
He didn’t speak with Calenius again until they stopped to rest their horses and stretch their legs.
“At the inn last night I met a man with a well-trained dog,” Hanuvar said.
Calenius waited, sensing rightly Hanuvar wouldn’t mention the information unless he had more to say.
“When he passed near the light, I noticed a ring he wore. It resembled one I’d seen on the hand of a revenant who’d sent a hound against me.”
“You want me to know this is revenant work.”
“I suspect them. Do you have other enemies?”
“I do.”
“Your magic sensed the hounds. Was there anything unnatural about them?”
The question set Calenius thinking. “Was there something unnatural about the one you saw earlier?”
“Resiliency. Speed. A focus on purpose beyond ordinary.”
“There was something lying quiescent in them all. An inactive power. It allowed me to sense them better. Why didn’t you mention this sooner?”
“You’re as used to shadows as I am. I didn’t think you’d want to jump at them.”
“I suppose not.”
“Can that spell you controlled them with be used against people?”
“At some cost, and in limited numbers, yes. Does that trouble you? You don’t strike me as the type that needs a fight to be fair.”
“Not a fight that needs won,” Hanuvar said.
“Exactly.”
They walked their horses for a while, munching on dried rations, then rode them until nearly twilight. Calenius informed him they needed to eat dry rations again that evening, so anyone hunting them would see no campfire. “We’ll cook breakfast,” he added.
Calenius set out the black stone once more and noticed Hanuvar watching him. “Do you sense anything from this?”
“A feeling of disquiet. Either the stone itself or the magic attached to it doesn’t belong here.”
“I might have said the same thing, once. I wasn’t always a sorcerer. I didn’t like them, or trust them.” He sneered. “I still don’t.”
“Why become one then?”
“You master the tools you need to achieve your goals.”
Hanuvar understood that. Just as he understood that sorcery usually took years to master, like any difficult art. He already knew Calenius was older than he looked. “What is the stone?”
“Our safeguard, this night. If something closes on us, the powers within will alert us. Before our enemies get close.” Calenius stood and an arrow plunged out of the night. Incredibly, he seemed to sense it and had begun to move, but could not completely avoid it. The shaft stood out from his right bicep.
Mastiffs then burst from the undergrowth and tore forward, their images blurred behind them as though their physical forms outsped their spirits.
Hanuvar rose and struck but the dog slid past his blade tip and circled for him, a blurred image in its wake. At the same time Calenius flicked a finger toward the black stone and a glowing, transparent man shape streamed up. It came straight at Hanuvar, its ghostly face strained and mournful. Hanuvar’s skin chilled as the thing made eye contact. And while he did not recognize it, the specter seemed to register him, for its mouth parted in something like awe before veering past and springing upon the dog.
The animal shuddered to a halt, twisting and turning as the phantom wrestled with it and then drifted away, bearing a transparent dog shape into the sky and leaving behind an unmoving animal.
Another arrow launched as Calenius ducked, and a second mastiff leapt. Calenius caught it in two hands and broke its back across his knee.
Hanuvar dashed on toward the tree where he’d seen the archer take cover, only to encounter a final dog. He’d slipped the ring onto his finger. A phantom woman flowed past him, her expression shifting from pained horror to one of curiosity; he had the sense that in her recognition she deliberately kept further from him. And then she interposed herself between him and the final animal, tearing its living spirit free before fading into the night.
The houndsman lifted his bow at sight of Hanuvar, who threw himself forward, landed on his hands, and came up in a roll. He heard the twang of the string and felt the brush of air as the arrow passed over his shoulder. And then he was pushing off a crouch and burying his knife in the houndsman’s breast.
The man fell back, whacking Hanuvar in the shoulder with the bow. A smaller dog growled but did not advance. Hanuvar recognized it for the younger one he’d befriended.
The houndsman staggered up with a knife slash that Hanuvar leapt backward to avoid; he brought his sword down, hard, against the arm and cut halfway through it.
The dog came forward, growling, but Hanuvar’s sideways sweep of his leg forced it away. The houndsman sank to his knees.
His eyes sought Hanuvar’s own. They were half closed in pain, but their look was pleading. “Don’t kill my dog,” he gasped.
“Who sent you?” Hanuvar placed the sword to his throat.
The man was having trouble breathing. “My dog—you promise?”
“Yes.”
“Aquilius.”
Calenius came from the side, bent, and plunged his sword through his chest. The houndsman slumped in death.
The young dog bared its teeth and growled.
Calenius pivoted and struck down toward the animal.
Hanuvar caught the weapon on his own, a blow that all but numbed his arm.
The dog slunk away into the undergrowth, tail between its legs.
Calenius stood panting. Hanuvar smelled the blood trailing down his arm, heard the spatter of its drops on the grass. A feathered arrow shaft stood out from the big man’s arm.
Swords still locked, they eyed one another.
After a long moment Calenius pulled his blade from Hanuvar’s own. “You only promised YOU wouldn’t kill the dog. You should be more flexible.”
“The death was unnecessary.” Hanuvar lowered his weapon.
Calenius examined his blade, judged it clean, and sheathed it. “You can take that man-of-your-word business too far.”
“Do you?” Hanuvar asked.
“Sometimes I have.”
Hanuvar wiped his blade clean on the dead man.
Calenius knelt over the body and searched it, seemingly uncaring about his wound. He discovered some coins, some hidden knives, and, lastly, the ring, which he raised to the moonlight and studied with care. Finally he tossed it toward Hanuvar, who only decided to catch it at the last moment. He had already removed his own.
“It’s not poisonous. You like dogs. Take it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s ritually bonded to something alive. Probably that remaining dog. If it ever comes within range again.”
Hanuvar slipped it into a belt pouch. “We should see to that wound.”
Calenius glanced to the shaft sticking out from him. Hanuvar almost expected him to pull it free, like a hero from an epic. “All right,” he said. The big man didn’t add that he could have handled it himself. It could be challenging to treat your own injury though, and Calenius wasn’t so determined to prove his self-sufficiency that he would turn down the offer of assistance.
He stoically endured having the shaft pulled free, and spoke while Hanuvar readied the wine to drip against the bleeding tear through his muscle. “This land was very different once. A long lake lay at the foot of these hills, and they were taller then. A great road, wider and flatter than those the Dervans make, wound through them to a fine little city full of pipers famed for their talent and lithe, pretty women who loved to dance.”
Hanuvar poured the wine over the torn flesh and the big man winced.
“Your home city?” Hanuvar asked.
“What? No. One of the allied states. You don’t question the truth of what I say?”
“I know when I’m hearing truth. How old are you?”
“Not as old as the hills. Not quite. Here’s the place where you ask my secret. Or ask me to share it.”
“The secret of your long life?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You’re an intriguing man, Hanuvar.”
He had not called him by name since the day of their first meeting.
Calenius rose and fumbled at his own belt pouch. He withdrew a small glittering disk, the size of a coin, but unmarked. “These take months to fashion. Normally I’d just let the wound heal on its own but . . . we need to be on our toes soon.” He pressed the disk to his arm and it sank against his skin. He sucked in a breath and held it. The gold patch sparked, then lit with azure flame. A moment later, it had vanished, leaving fresh pink tissue in its wake.
“Amazing,” Hanuvar said.
“Like all magic, it has its cost.”
“Where did you get the Volani spirits?” Hanuvar’s casual tone belied the intensity in his expression.
Calenius lowered his arm. He did not ask how Hanuvar had been able to tell. The woman’s spirit had been obvious, but it was possible Calenius had been too busy to see their garments.
“They are free to move on now,” Calenius said.
“How many more do you hold?”
Calenius lowered his arm. “That’s my business.”
“They’re my people.”
The other man shook his head. “They’re dead people. And if not for me, the revenants would have had them. You can probably guess what they wished them for. With me, they’re free to move on once they’ve served their purpose.”
Hanuvar kept his breath controlled, thinking of the trapped, lonely voices young Teonia had spoken of. “You haven’t answered my question. How many do you have?”
Calenius’ voice grew stern. “I’ve never counted them. Do you mean to break your word to me? I pledge that I will not harm them, and that come the next full moon I shall let them all go.”
“Why?”
“It’s enough that I speak the truth. You know me for a man of my word.”
“I shall keep my word,” Hanuvar said finally. “But I want the full truth from you.”
“They were dead already, or going to be. It was war. I thought you could see far enough to understand that, but you’re chained by sentiment.”
“And you are not? You yourself said it had brought you to this point.”
“So I did.” Calenius flexed his arm a final time and then climbed to his feet. “Let’s find a different camp site.”
Both men were alert for other signs of pursuit, and before long they spotted a furred shape slinking in the distance after them. The surviving dog. Calenius gave Hanuvar a wry look.
He hadn’t donned either ring. That, though, didn’t seem to matter to the animal, who wandered in just beyond the campfire that night, downwind of the horses. It paced around a while and then hunkered onto the ground, its eyes just visible by reflected firelight.
The big man seemed entertained by its presence. When Hanuvar tossed it some of the rations he even chuckled and threw some himself.
The next day it followed closely enough that Calenius joked Hanuvar would have to name it, and the animal ranged even nearer to the campfire that evening.
In the succeeding nights Calenius had no more call to use the black stone, for they saw no other followers. They sat at a fire with the dog near Hanuvar, watching quietly, and Calenius spoke of the land as it had been, and olden times, with a strange vulnerability that reminded Hanuvar of the way Volani survivors spoke of their city.
“What happened to it?” Hanuvar asked.
Calenius was a moment answering. “Men happened to it. Men swollen with pride and men hungry for things they thought they needed. War came and famine followed.”
“And you were there.”
“Aye, and I fought against the end of things, and sometimes I brought it, and eventually I soured of it all and wandered. I have lived many lifetimes and learned many things.”
“You have become a sorcerer. And a scholar.”
“By necessity and accident. It’s easy to know history if you’ve lived it, easy to know languages if you have spoken them. Look at you and the languages you speak, and the skills you’ve mastered to further your goals. Think how many more you would know if you were like me.”
It sounded as though Calenius had familiarized himself with Hanuvar’s activities, at least in part. He did not comment upon that. “So you’re immortal.”
“I don’t age, which is a different thing. I am merely hard to kill.” He fell silent, and the campfire drew flickering shadows across his heavy features. His eerie blue eyes fixed upon Hanuvar. “Most men, knowing this, would ask me how this has been achieved. You never do. Why is that?”
He could have told him he had been given an inkling of how that might be done last fall, and how unclean the experience had been. Instead, he shrugged. “What is a man without his people?”
“You would have endless days to see the new wonders men wrought, to glimpse new vistas. To chance new things.”
“You sound like you’re proposing a sale.”
“What if I was?” Calenius’ look was piercing, though he affected a breezy manner. “I could not offer it to you in the way I have it, but there are methods.”
“You are lonely.”
“I have company whenever I want. What I don’t have is a peer.”
Even with a companion Calenius would think himself peerless, but Hanuvar did not say that. “Give immortality to a philosopher, or a poet, or an inventor. Someone who can help to build a land where swords are needed less, and the children prosper.”
“You think I haven’t tried that? The playwright drowned himself after 150 years. Heartbroken after his village was wiped away by plague. A zealot killed the scientist. None of them could endure.”
“And you think I could.”
“You and I are of a kind. Oh, you’re soft still. I see some of the mistakes in your thinking I used to make, but the potential’s there. In a century or so, when the world’s changed and any surviving descendants are remote, you’ll grow beyond worries about a dog, or damaging the little lives you cross. Most of them matter no more than ants. If you step on one, others will come and it makes no difference in the larger scheme.”
“You sound no different than a man born to great wealth. And yet I know you’ve suffered and struggled in a way those men rarely do.”
Calenius looked mildly affronted. “There’s a world of difference. I’ve tried to lift them up. But each generation they make the same mistakes. They stumble into the same hatreds and the same tragedies.”
Hanuvar’s thoughts turned fleetingly to the thirst for revenge he’d seen in the eyes of Bomilcar and his crew, and the same yearning he guessed present in his daughter. Was Calenius right? Were men and women doomed always to repeat the same kind of errors? “So what is it that you’re working for, with all this searching, and this trip into the wilds? Something for yourself?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I’m not as far removed as I thought I was.”
“Riddles. You hint you wish me to join you, but won’t share your vision.”
“I don’t think your perspective is mature enough to understand it.”
“You could explain.”
“Perhaps.” Calenius eyed him. “I will consider it.”
Hanuvar did not crave immortality. The strength to carry on in health to see his goals won, certainly. But to achieve so much remove that he could view his fellow men as insects struck him as monstrous. He decided to probe further. “You try to sound calculating and unfeeling. But love for something drives you on. I think you may be a better man than you’ve convinced yourself you are.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve known the kind of men you pretend to be. They lack insight into the feelings of others. Their whole lives revolve around their own needs, and if they feel any kind of love it’s mostly a sense of ownership. You’re too perceptive to be one of them. Are you trying to fool yourself, so that your existence is less painful? Or have you fallen for your own deception?”
Calenius’ gaze was long and searching. There was challenge there, and surprise. He looked as though he wished to say something, and went so far as to open his mouth. It was still a long moment before he spoke. “What do you mean to do, Hanuvar? Where are you taking them?”
“You don’t know? You worked for the revenants.”
“There are rumors of a colony, somewhere far away. But even the legate doubts it.” Calenius’ gaze was certain. “He underestimates you, doesn’t he. He makes the mistake of believing you think like him. That you are centered around Derva and its doings so are envious and vengeful. You don’t actually care about that background, do you? What’s the place like?”
“You saw the beauty of Volanus,” Hanuvar said wearily. “It is nothing so grand, except that it, too, sits by the sea, and my surviving people dwell there.”
“And you mean to find them all. To take them there.” The expression on Calenius’ face shifted between admiration and ridicule, as if he were pulled back and forth between contrary emotions.
“While I still breathe, I will not abandon them.”
“Most will not deserve that measure of loyalty.”
“Am I being too sentimental? What is it you’re really doing, Calenius?”
The big man looked almost as though he were ready to say. And then his mouth snapped shut.
“Will your plan harm my people?”
Calenius was a long time answering. There was only the sound of the fire crackling. The dog snuffled in its sleep. “Nothing I’m doing will bring direct harm to your people,” he said finally.
Hanuvar recognized that as a reply carefully structured to speak truth while leaving damning details untold. “And indirectly?”
“I’ll be working with powerful forces. But most of your people are far away, aren’t they?”
“Yes. And the rest should be soon.”
“I’ll begin the spell on Esuvia the evening of the full moon.”
“You’re saying they should be gone by then. That doesn’t leave us much time. What about the Dervans?”
“You can’t honestly tell me you care about the fate of the Dervans.”
“The majority had nothing to do with what happened to my people.”
The sorcerer shook his head. “You had me thinking just now that we were even more alike than I thought. And then you go and say something like that. I’ve told you more than enough. You gave your word. Will you hold it?”
“I am a man of my word.”
Calenius climbed to his feet. “Enough. We should sleep. Tomorrow we’ll reach the mountain, and the guardian.”
“What will this guardian be protecting?”
“An ancient tool.”
“Is this what you sought in the tunnels?”
“No. I’ve found that. This is something else.”
He stopped asking for details. If Calenius wished to say more about it, he would have. Apparently he’d had more candor than he could stand this evening.
IV
The next day they woke to gray skies. As they reached the forested slope of a spindly mountain the clouds opened up and soaked them for almost an hour. After, the sky remained overcast in dirty gray clouds, layering the remote countryside in shadows. Tyvol had been settled for long centuries, but in this rough hinterland they had gone two days without seeing so much as another cookfire. Untamed wilderness stretched to the horizon.
Once the rain abated they picketed their horses and worked their way up the mountain side. So used was Hanuvar to protecting against his old knee injury that he mentally readied for it to start bothering him on the long uphill climb. Just as swiftly he remembered he’d been untroubled by it since his magical accident late last year.
The view proved splendid. Rolling foothills, their greenery brightened by the rain, stretched into the distance, and once they were upon the mountain’s forested shoulder Hanuvar discovered a river flowing just on its other side, swollen from the recent rain. Here at last were signs of civilization, for distant smoke rose against the southern sky.
Nearer at hand were signs of a far more ancient settlement. Walls of shining black stone peeked out from behind vines and bushes. Calenius examined them without comment and strode further uphill, from time to time pausing to collect his bearings.
His path took them further and further west, up to a wide, rocky ledge before a cliff rising toward the mountain’s final height. Calenius chopped through some low-lying brush, revealing a cliff wall decorated with small letters and images.
A few months before Hanuvar had stood before images carved into the ruins that Calenius excavated upon Mount Esuvia. These were similar, precise marks with either perfect curves or perfectly straight lines carved deeply into stone, sided by depictions of the same huge bull-serpent hybrids. The recent rain darkened the etchings with peculiar clarity.
Calenius walked left to right along the rock face, studying them.
Hanuvar watched, his attention shifting sometimes to the stark peak rising above, or to their surroundings. Vegetation-wrapped stone pylons lay like the carcass of a monstrous beast, extending forty feet into empty space above the river gorge, perhaps the remnant of some ancient bridge that would have crossed to the mountain opposite.
The young mastiff inspected the grounds cautiously, sniffing, then moved to Hanuvar’s side.
Calenius traced a span of the wall symbols with his fingers as he walked, then stopped and swept hands along twin sets of long, sharp characters.
The wall before them shuddered. Dirt and grime exploded in a cloud of dust; an arched stone door swung wide, revealing a dark cavern.
Calenius stood in contemplation, his red-maned head tilted to one side. He put one hand to his sword while the other was spread before him.
The dog growled.
After a long moment Calenius dropped his hand to the side. He spoke softly. “Ready a torch.”
Both carried shoulder packs stuffed with equipment and supplies; Hanuvar slipped his off and took out one of the pre-prepared sturdy bundles of stiff plant fibers. One end had been dipped in wax. He chose a flat spot to lay out dry tinder. The dog watched closely, probably thinking they’d be cooking food.
Hanuvar’s practiced hands soon raised a spark, and before long he rose with the light and stepped up beside Calenius.
“Here’s where it gets interesting,” the big man said.
Hanuvar would have preferred someone else hold the flame, but understood his role as assistant was the price for the information he had gained.
Calenius stepped forward into the cavern, Hanuvar just behind him. The torchlight revealed a rectangular hall carved into the mountainside, and threw back the glitter of gold, for the ancients had inlaid enough precious metal into the images on these black walls to set the emperor’s accountants salivating.
The dust of long centuries coated the floor. The interior lay empty save for a rectangular stone plinth at its one end, crowded with figures and images in those flawless lines and curves. Behind it stood a peculiar elephant-sized sculpture resembling the inner workings of a complex pulley system, for it contained gears fashioned from some hard black metal. With its long black rods and elongated frame, the object looked a little as though a mad artist had begun fashioning a giant cricket from scraps found in a shipping warehouse and stopped before completion.
Calenius motioned for the torch and Hanuvar passed it over. The wizard walked to the shrine, the torchlight mirroring off the sculpture’s shining black gears. To Hanuvar they alarmingly resembled the joints on a crab.
The tail of the big man’s long red hair swayed as he lifted the torch high overhead. On the wall above the sculpture, man-shaped images pressed hands to round objects from which straight rays emerged, as though gods lay hands to the sun. One figure pushed a sun to the left, one to the right, and one in the middle lifted it over his head.
The figures themselves were depicted with the bare minimum of details—only flat lines suggested hands and feet, and the oval head had no features whatsoever.
“To what god does this temple belong?” Hanuvar asked.
“The Dervans have no real name for him, but in my tongue he is the lonely one, the lord of days.”
Hanuvar then understood the god to represent the entity the Herrenes dubbed Tondros, the lord of time. He did not say it, but Calenius’ look sharpened, as though he had recognized realization in Hanuvar’s expression.
Calenius passed the torch back to Hanuvar, who took it, keeping his eyes from its bright heart.
The big man knelt before the dark stone and began to hum, his fingers slowly tracing over curving symbols.
The melody was striking and strange. Though highly repetitive, each pass through its darkly lyrical progression added an additional note so that it grew in complexity.
Calenius shifted along the altar upon his knees, tracing the figures more and more quickly, though the speed of his humming did not change.
Finally he arrived at the far end of the characters. His melody stopped abruptly, without resolution. He held his position, fingers splayed over the final symbols. His eyes lifted to the image on the back wall. Hanuvar’s own gaze was pulled to that peculiar sculpture. After a long moment, some of its gears turned, despite the absence of visible rope or pulley. At the same time, high in the wall, a small rectangular door swung wide, revealing a cavity in which a curved white ram’s horn rested upon a marble stand. Decorative metal reinforced the instrument’s rim and formed a trumpet mouth piece, the torchlight setting it gleaming redly beneath webbing and dust.
Hanuvar returned his gaze to the sculpture. Its wheels had stopped their movement.
Calenius climbed to his feet. “It appears the measures I took countermanded the guardian.”
As though it were a machine powered by hubris, the sculpture rose, poised on lean legs of black metal. It lifted a spinning circular gear at the end of a long black neck like a terrible head. It was not a cricket, but a wide centaur of metal with curved black arms like scythes. Its long metal legs sent vibrations through the floor as it stamped toward them.
Calenius darted in with his great sword and swung, only to have his blow parried by one of the curved black arms. Behind them the dog barked warnings, frantic with distress.
The metal thing scurried forward with a sudden burst of speed, and as Hanuvar backstepped he studied the joints and the spinning gears, seeing them as weak points if he carried the proper weapon. But he was unwilling to relinquish his sword to jam a gear. Calenius retreated with him, his brows drawn in concentration.
“It may not have power beyond the chamber,” he said.
They passed beyond the threshold and the metallic thing clattered after, somehow all the more horrific in juxtaposition to the green mountainside, for there was nothing of the natural world about it. It paused briefly, its spinning head rising as if it sniffed its surroundings.
“Now what?” Hanuvar asked.
“Draw it left!”
Hanuvar waved his hands above his head and stepped away. The thing stamped after him, not swift, but certain, relentless, its pointed legs scoring the dirt and stone. Hanuvar backed toward the bridge remnant. The dog rushed the thing’s side, barking, then crouched beneath a scythe-like blade that just missed taking off his ear tips.
Calenius raced from behind carrying a gleaming silver circlet the size of a dessert plate. He tossed it at the thing’s back legs and the circle fastened about one of the metal limbs, at the same time lashing out with a snaky tendril for a second. The pressure pulled the legs toward one another. Though slowed, the thing limped still for Hanuvar, using the linked legs like a single one. It stretched its long cylindrical neck toward him, the headlike gear at its end spinning like a sling.
Hanuvar threw himself back as the gear shot his direction. He landed flat, the metal spinning over him and out beyond the cliff. He slapped the ground with his hands to absorb the impact, but unintentionally struck a rock with the back of his head. Stars flamed across his field of vision as he forced himself upright. Pained and dizzied by the impact, his footing was off, and he could only retreat toward the bridge as the metal monster limped on, swinging its blade arms for him again and again.
Calenius tossed a second of the silver circles, but the thing seemed to sense the attack coming, for it sidestepped. The circle rolled ineffectively to the right.
“Keep it distracted,” Calenius shouted.
Hanuvar was too busy dodging to dignify the instructions with a response. He was being herded perilously close to the cliff’s edge and the bridge remnant, and as Calenius dashed off he wondered if the wizard were simply hurrying away to grab the horn.
Only about eight feet to the left Calenius’ second circle of metal lay glistening against the rocky soil, a plate-sized disc that might be of aid. The trick was reaching it without being sliced in half. Hanuvar gauged the timing of those swinging arms, readied his sword, and ducked beneath a scythe. He jammed his blade into a spinning gear at the base of the right blade arm.
The arm stopped its sideways movement but the thing turned and swung its neck at him. It wasn’t a blade, but a metal club swung with such force could maim or kill. Hanuvar rolled sideways, wobbling when he came upright. His balance was still challenged from his head blow.
But he had arrived at the silver disc. He closed his hand on it, wondering how to activate the device, for there was no obvious trigger. Magic. He scowled, shoving the disc into his tunic before unlimbering his knife. The monster ignored the barking dog and limped on for him.
He supposed the best option left was to time a rush under that damaged limb, but he didn’t fully trust his reaction speed. The remaining arm scythed back and forth as if it were eager to get into slicing range.
Calenius ran up on the opposite side of the metal monster with a sturdy tree limb twice the length of a spear. Immense muscles stood out on the wizard’s heavy arms, and his teeth were clenched with effort.
Just before he made contact the bizarre machine pivoted, somehow sensing Calenius’ approach. The log struck amongst its tethered legs and wedged in the pipes forming its greater body mass.
It flailed with legs and arms, either to seek purchase or to finish Hanuvar—without an obvious head it was hard to tell, but it was clearly being pushed into the only space left to him. He leapt out from the cliff and away. For a brief moment he was suspended in space and then he had landed athwart one of the pylon beams jutting above the turbulent river running swift and deep far below. He struggled to regain his breath. The black stone of the old bridge itself was slick, but the ivy coating was his salvation. He gripped the thick roots, twisting to watch the final moment of the battle. The thing had pressed all of its limbs to the earth, even its neck, seeking traction. The rocky soil it touched sparked and shrieked in protest as Calenius pushed it on for the cliff edge.
With a final savage shout Calenius shoved it over the side. The metal monster plunged into a stony projection fifty feet below, hitting with a loud metallic clang. Limbs and shards shot out in different directions, and then the greater mass tumbled into the foaming water.
The cliff’s edge and safety lay only a few feet to Hanuvar’s right, but he waited to catch his breath before he dared sidling along the bridge beam.
Calenius crunched up to the precipice and looked out at him, chest heaving.
“What was that?” Hanuvar asked.
“A guardian of the old ones,” Calenius said. “I must have forgotten some of the ceremony.”
“Pity.”
“I couldn’t have done this without you,” the sorcerer said slowly, and the regret in his voice immediately alerted Hanuvar. “Which means I owe you my eternal thanks. My people, too, will thank you.”
“Thank me by helping me to safety.”
Calenius didn’t move. The dog had trotted near him but eyed him with continued distrust, his gaze shifting back and forth between Hanuvar and the big man’s leg. He let out an alert bark.
“I didn’t plan this part,” Calenius admitted. “I meant to take your measure, and I have. I’d have liked to have brought you with me. But I think you’ve figured it out, and I know now you’d try to stop me.”
Hanuvar hadn’t entirely deduced the man’s plan, and watched him, one hand shifting first toward his throwing knife.
“I regret this,” Calenius continued. From his belt he lifted a hatchet.
The dog had apparently seen enough. It launched at the wizard’s leg.
Calenius pivoted, lashing out with one foot, and struck the mastiff’s chest. The dog yiped and scrambled backward, then lost his footing on the cliff’s edge. His back legs tried to dig into the cliff wall as his front paws struggled for purchase.
Hanuvar sidled right, hoping to reach firmer ground while Calenius was distracted, but the vines proved poorer purchase than imagined and his timing was off. Down he went, the dog plummeting after.
The moments stretched on, lengthened by his stress. The river implacably coursed below, and it seemed he had an eternity to consider the rising volume of the water and his oncoming doom. He recalled a Ruminian bragging about the way to survive cliff drops into the ocean, a game their young men sometimes played. He had quizzed the fellow at length, and his companions had chimed in. Strike feet first, they had said, with your arms folded across your chest, expel your air when you hit and kick for the surface.
How high was he? Somewhere he had heard no one survived a plunge from further than seventy-five feet and he felt certain he was higher than that.
He smelled the water as he neared, heard the smack of it as his feet took the surface. It smarted and his left ankle felt as though he’d been stabbed. He didn’t cry out, though, for he was already under the cool water. The sound of the dog hitting nearby was a rush in his ears.
He expelled his breath, kicked to the surface. Something was wrong with his foot but he moved through the sharp pain around his ankle, and somehow his head broke water and he drifted, disoriented, the current sweeping him onward.
The dog paddled weakly nearby, spinning in circles. Everything had a dreamy, unreal quality. The river rolled him on past steep-sided mountain glades, beautiful and wild. Hanuvar wondered if he was going to die not from the terrible drop but because there was no way out of the current.
They were carried past rounded rocks and beyond a bend and down past another craggy mountain. Hanuvar, weakening, his arms heavy, his left leg numb from pain, his sandals clumsy weights, at last spotted a weed-choked gap along the rocky shoreline. He tapped his final reserves, fueled more by desperation than strength, and fought stroke by stroke against the water’s pull until he’d reached calmer water. He pushed on into the shallows and got his feet under him, although his left would barely hold him. He stopped to take stock of himself and spotted the dog fifty feet behind, still paddling.
He paused his panting to whistle.
The animal saw him and made efforts in his direction. But the mastiff must have been nearly spent, for he advanced little.
Hanuvar moved out until he was almost shoulder deep, his arms extended. He called again, and the white-eyed dog struggled for him.
He came within a few feet, his ears up, his eyes wide, but didn’t quite have the strength to make that final push to safety. Hanuvar leaned out, grabbed the mastiff’s left front paw, and was spun himself into the current. Still holding to the dog, kicking through his pain, he fought again into the calmer water, swallowing a mouthful for his trouble.
But he got his good foot under him and released the dog, who struggled on to the shore. Hanuvar forced himself after. The mastiff staggered out of the water, head low, and trembling. He then plopped down on his side without even shaking off the water that streamed from his sodden fur, and lay panting.
Hanuvar scanned the environment as he limped dripping onto the sandy beach. He only just then registered how cold he was. A low hill lay before him, and piney mountains rose on either side. He saw no sign of human habitation, and they’d been carried far enough that both Calenius and his mountain had vanished from sight.
Hanuvar sank down beside the animal, whose tail wearily slapped the muddy bank. He reached out and ruffled his head. “Good dog.”
He bent forward to feel his lower calf and ankle. Grimace-inducing pain followed his exploration. Gazing back the way they’d come, he imagined the mountain that lay beyond his sight and wondered if Calenius had seen his survival. He might be looking southward even now.
He hadn’t entirely deduced what Calenius thought he’d want to stop, but knew with certainty he must. Unfortunately, he was on the wrong side of a river bank, deep in the remote Turian countryside, injured, and with almost no resources of his own, many days away from Calenius’ home base, where he surely meant to work some great magic. The wizard intended to launch his ceremony on the full moon. That gave Hanuvar just over seven days to work his way back, on foot, and find a way to counter a man of vast resources who was stronger, faster, more experienced, and quite possibly smarter as well, not to mention a wizard of frightening potency, likely to have shielded his operations with any number of unseen protections. He’d certainly been fortifying it with visible ones.
The confrontation was not a pleasant prospect, but he forced himself upright. Though weary, dizzied, and in pain, there was no time to waste.
Long days were to pass before any of us back in Apicius grew concerned with Hanuvar’s absence. After all, so far he had not been gone longer than expected.
Izivar kept herself occupied by managing her business. She had begun to divest herself of its more far-flung holdings, and, with some regrets, oversaw the packing and removal of many of the family treasures from the Apicius villa, which had long been her favorite of all the Lenereva properties.
We were soon to be swept up in matters beyond our control. First, a series of small quakes rocked the entire region, and Esuvia regularly sprouted smoke. Rumors spread that the wizard on the mountain had angered the local gods, and some even claimed that his people were digging strange trenches up and down the mountainside. This was something of an exaggeration, although eventually we were to learn the truth that had led to it.
Though the ground rumbled and Esuvia smoked, visitors flooded Apicius, for the Festival of Athelius was shortly to begin. And while Izivar and I naturally wondered how Hanuvar fared, we had other problems, namely the liberation of some that the festival had brought conveniently close.
—Sosilos, Book Sixteen
20. New Volanus had been founded by adherents of the Cabera family, who held no love for the Lenereva, because Tannis Lenereva, her father, had masterminded the exile and betrayal that had driven Hanuvar from the city of the silver towers.—Silenus
21. While Izivar’s family had lived in several homes, that in Apicius was the one to which she had been most attached, for her father had preferred to spend time in Ostra. She had arranged it to her liking after the death of her husband, and it was with some difficulty that she prepared to leave it for New Volanus, never to return.—Silenus