The Black Raven. Katharine Kerr

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СКАЧАТЬ very odd! We were just speaking of him, Rhodry and I.’

      ‘Not odd at all. You were feeling his approach, my love, through the mists of the future.’

      ‘His approach?’

      ‘That’s what I’ve come to ask you about. You see, he’s gone quite mad, and I don’t have the slightest idea of what to do about it.’

      ‘Ah. And I suppose you think I do.’

      ‘Don’t you?’

      Dalla considered for a long moment.

      ‘Perhaps,’ she said at last. ‘I’m remembering some of the things Jill told me about him. He had a great talent for dweomer, so she said. He studied it for many years, but then he just walked away from it.’

      ‘Will that drive someone mad?’

      ‘Indeed it will. You can’t just stop your studies once you’ve reached a certain point.’

      ‘Imph.’ Evandar rubbed his chin with one hand. ‘This world of yours, my love. Everything here seems so – so wretchedly irrevocable.’

      ‘Not exactly.’ Dallandra paused for a laugh. ‘He could have left the dweomer, certainly, if he’d wished. But he needed to go back to his teacher and have her help him. How to explain this – let me think – well, I can’t, really, but there are rituals that seal things off properly, that stop certain processes which studying dweomer starts in motion.’

      Evandar blinked rapidly several times.

      ‘Oh well,’ Dallandra went on. ‘It doesn’t particularly matter. I suppose you want me to try to cure Ebañy for you.’

      ‘Not so much for me, but for his own self and his father. You see, I promised Devaberiel that I’d bring his son home. And so I went looking for him in Bardek, and I found him quite deranged. His wife’s frantic about it.’

      ‘He has a wife, then.’

      ‘And children. A lot of children, actually. I didn’t get a chance to count them.’

      ‘Well, you can’t just snatch him away from his family.’

      ‘Here’s a great marvel. I realized that all on my own.’ Evandar smiled and leaned over to kiss her. ‘So I thought I’d bring them all over.’

      ‘Over where?’ Dallandra grabbed his shoulders and pushed him to arm’s length. ‘And when? There’s not enough food in the dun for everyone who’s already in it. You’ll have to wait until the first harvest – early summer, that will be.’

      ‘Well, then, you see? It’s a grand thing that I thought to consult with you first. Especially since there’s also the little matter of his travelling show.’

      ‘Travelling show?’

      ‘His eldest son juggles. His eldest daughter and her brother walk the slack wire.’ Evandar held up one hand and began counting things off on his fingers. ‘Then he’s got friends who are jugglers and acrobats. Rather a lot of those, actually. Some lasses rescued from slavery who dance with scarves. Servants. Horse handlers, and of course, the horses and wagons. And then –’

      ‘That’s quite enough.’

      ‘And then,’ Evandar went inexorably on, ‘the elephant.’

      Dallandra goggled at him.

      ‘An elephant, my love,’ Evandar said, grinning, ‘is an enormous beast. Not quite so big as a dragon, but large enough. It has a thick grey hide, a pair of huge ears, and then a long nose that acts like a hand. It picks things up.’

      ‘I don’t care about its nose. You can’t bring it here.’

      ‘I did come to that conclusion.’ He went on grinning. ‘So where, my love, shall I bring it and all the rest of them?’

      ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. Let me think on it.’ Dallandra paused for a sigh that came out more like a growl. ‘I’m beginning to understand why the very mention of Salamander made Jill furious.’

      ‘Indeed? Here, Salamander claims that Jill cursed him when they parted, but frankly, I can’t believe it of her.’

      ‘No more can I. How very very odd! I’ll ask Rhodry what he thinks.’

      ‘Do that, if you’d be so kind.’ Evandar frowned down at the filthy snow. ‘And now I’d best be off again. I’ve a great many concerns these days, and they seem to have got themselves all tangled in my mind.’

      From Cengarn Evandar took to the mothers of all roads. It seemed to him that he walked on the north wind like a long grey path in the sky. When he travelled between worlds, he heard now and again scattered words and snatches of conversations, and at other times he saw visions in brief glimpses, as if he looked through windows into the future, a vast shadowed room. Today, however, the omens shunned him. The silence irked; he found himself pausing to listen, but all he ever heard was the whistle and churn of the air, and all he saw were clouds.

      When he left the north wind’s road, he found himself at the edge of the forest that marked the border of his own true country. Instead of crossing it, he turned to his right and found a path that led into a scatter of boulders. As he strode along, the air grew colder; suddenly the sky turned grey, and snow fell in a scatter of flakes. It seemed that he was walking downhill; below him in the sunset light Loc Vaedd gleamed, a green jewel set in snow. Evandar took another step and found himself standing on Citadel’s peak among the wind-twisted trees, the highest point of Cerr Cawnen, a city of circles. In the middle stood the rocky peak of Citadel Island. Around it stretched the blue-green lake, fed by hot springs and thus free of ice even in the dead of winter. At the edge of the lake on crannogs and shore stood the tangled houses of the city proper, while around them ran a huge circle of stone walls, where the town militia guarded shut gates. Just the summer before, Cerr Cawnen had received a warning that the savage Horsekin tribes of the far north were on the move, and such warnings were best attended to.

      In fact, even though the town drowsed in blessed ignorance, a human being lived among them who spied for the Horsekin. Some twenty feet below Evandar’s perch, on the east side of Citadel’s peak a tunnel mouth gaped among tumbled chunks of stone and broken masonry. It led to an ancient temple, cracked and half-buried by an earthquake a long while previous. Evandar started to go down, but he saw the spy – Raena, her name was – climbing up the path from the town below. He stepped back into the trees to avoid her. Even though she was young and pretty in a fleshy sort of way, she walked bent over like an old woman as she struggled up the slope in her long cloak. When at the tunnel mouth she paused to pull her dark hair back from her face, Evandar could see the livid marks like bruises under her eyes and the pallor of her skin. Quite possibly Shaetano was using her as wood to fuel his fires even as she thought she was using him to serve her Horsekin masters.

      Raena climbed down into the tunnel. Evandar waited a long moment, then shrank his form and turned himself into a large black dog. His nails clicked on stone as he followed her in. After a few yards the tunnel turned dark enough to hide him, but ahead, through the big split in the wall that formed the entrance to the temple room, he could see the silver glow of Raena’s dweomer light. He stopped to one side of the narrow entrance and listened, head cocked to one side, ears pricked, long tongue СКАЧАТЬ