Something had exploded over the valley floor where the first ranks of the Hastur force surrounded the puzzled Ambervale foot soldiers. A hazy dust filled the air, each particle alight with green phosphorescence. Men on both sides had stood open-mouthed to watch its eerie, glittering fall. It billowed on even the faintest breeze as it slowly settled. And then, as if sent by the Lord of Light himself, a wind had sprung up, fitful gusts blowing the stuff toward the retreating Ambervale army. Within a few minutes, the air had grown unnaturally still, but not before the glowing mist had covered a good portion of Deslucido’s men.
“Sweet mother of darkness,” Rafael said, his voice gone suddenly hoarse. “Bonewater dust.”
Bonewater dust. A laran weapon so horrible it poisoned the very land itself. No one knew how long its curse lasted, only that many who had been exposed and lived died later of burgeoning tumors, of falling-sickness with wasting and baldness, bloody diarrhea and madness.
“Deslucido must have dropped it to cover his retreat, but the wind betrayed him,” Rafael said. “The messenger spoke of bird-things, did he not? I have heard of small, individually guided devices, like birds with bellies of hollow glass, used to deliver clingfire.”
Coryn, too, had heard of such small, laran-powered machines. They were costly. Deslucido must have been mad to order such a thing.
“Your Majesty,” one of the officers said. “You must go back. The risk here is too great. Another shift in the wind, and Deslucido will have won.”
For a long moment, Rafael said nothing. The officer’s torch and Coryn’s ball of blue-white light cast warring hues over Rafael’s features. His eyes glittered gold and blue-white, although his expression remained impassive.
An aura flickered around the King’s head and shoulders, composed of energy rather than visible light, as if Aldones himself had touched the mortal man, turning him into something more. Something deep within Coryn shifted, opened. In that instant, he would have died for his King.
So this is what it means to be a son of the Lord of Light, Coryn thought. To have no thought for your own desires, your own life, except as it serves your kingdom. He thought of Taniquel with a shiver of inexpressible sadness.
“Majesty,” he said. “Let me remain behind. I am a trained Tower worker. I am needed here.”
Nothing moved on that stretch of land where the earth itself now smoldered with a ghostly green fire. Not even a rat or bird broke the stillness, nor were there any kyorebni, carrion birds, to be seen aloft. Until he looked down on the contaminated land, Coryn had no direct experience of bonewater dust. It was worse than he’d ever imagined.
Dark mounds covered the field, in places blotting out the luminescence of the poisoned earth, so thick and numerous were they. Coryn knew he looked upon the piled bodies of dead men, hundreds of them, lying where they fell as the dust blew over them.
The Hali workers, Lady Caitlin, the sentry-bird handler, Edric, and the slender young woman, stood together on a hilltop. Their heads were bent and eyes closed in concentration.
Coryn slipped from his horse and approached them, careful not to disturb their linkage. He touched the starstone at his throat, using it as a focal point, and the ordinary world blurred.
They had created a laran boundary akin to the one used to separate out the particles of raw clingfire. Coryn immediately saw the sense in it. Circles of Tower workers often handled dangerous materials without harm, so long as their concentration held. Bernardo’s experiments with the less-explosive detonated clingfire had used laran forces as a buffer. Coryn’s hands had healed completely from his lapse while refining fire-fighting chemicals, but he remembered the shame of having been the one to break focus.
Whether this bonewater dust worked as waves of energy or bits of material, he realized, it had a signature resonance, and Caitlin and the others struggled to set up an interference pattern matched to it.
Caitlin had the skill of decades of Tower training, and the girl the raw power. But she was no Keeper and the merging was inherently unbalanced. Edric’s mind bucked and pulled at the constraint of her iron-hard discipline.
Smoothly, firmly, he caught up and shaped their linked mental energies. Where Caitlin had striven to create a series of rigid shields, he imagined a huge, flexible bubble, shimmering blue with laran power, enclosing the entire contaminated zone. He made no attempt to interfere with the processes of the dust itself, though he sensed myriad bits of energy, mindless, doing only what their nature had created them to do. It was the malice of the men who shaped them which caused the destruction, not any inherent evil in the stuff. He thought of poisonous plants, which often made beautiful flowers and harmed no one unless eaten, or of herbs which could cure in one dosage and kill in another.
Let each thing keep to its natural place . . . He sent out the thought. The girl and the other man picked up it, amplified it.
Keep to its place . . .
The bits of energy whirled and darted within the bubble. Coryn softened the bubble’s filmy layer, giving it flexibility. The willow bends before the storm. The bird aloft shifts with the rising thermals . . .
He felt a surge of response in Edric’s mind as the man answered the image, envisioning the bubble as an airstream lifting a falcon’s wings. The willow, that was the girl Graciela, slender and whipcord-tough. She gave a silent laugh like rippling bells that reminded him of Bronwyn’s mental signature. Her bubble was a basket, thousands upon thousands of tendrils all woven together . . . growing together . . . so that not water, not wind, not the whirling bits of bonewater dust could penetrate.
Keep to its place . . .
Caitlin, with her orderly, squared-off patterns, she was the rock on which they all stood. If she could not weave or bind, she could anchor them in any storm.
Minute by minute, the bubble grew stronger. It shifted and flexed minutely under the battering of the energy motes, but where it gave way in one place, it drew closer in another. It held, containing the polluted land and air.
Rapt in the unity of the circle, Coryn felt a distant tug at his mind, a resonance which seemed muffled by a powerful barrier as well. Could it be that out there in that wasteland of a battlefield, someone still lived, someone with enough laran to reach out, if feebly, to the circle’s protective field?
Could it be Rumail?
Coryn flinched involuntarily at the thought. It took all his Tower discipline to instantly regain his focus, to hold and not to waver. Too much and too many lives depended upon his steadfastness.
Coryn, what is it? Caitlin had sensed his instant of distress.
Drawing upon her steadiness, he sent a thought questing out into the darkened fields. The life spark was dim, but not dying. It had been deliberately lowered, as the monks at Nevarsin did during the killing winters and as he himself had learned to do to conserve precious energy during the most demanding Tower work. He probed deeper.
An insulating blanket of laran . . .
An island of refuge in the midst of rampant poison . . .
Pain . . . A wound, no longer bleeding, but unhealed, enough to cripple any attempt at travel . . .
But no sense of identity.
The mind bore some resemblance to Rumail’s, what Coryn remembered from his first contact as a boy. If it were one of the others, someone Rumail had trained and worked with, he might well bear the stamp of his teacher’s personality. Should Coryn condemn him for that?
There is someone out there, he thought to Caitlin. But I can’t tell who.
One of our own, she asked, a latent talent?
Mentally, he sent her a negative reply. Faint though the presence was, it could not have come from an untrained mind.
It is your decision, she said telepathically. You are our Keeper.
Should he risk letting an innocent man die for fear he might be the banished laranzu? And if it was Rumail, how could he let even such a man perish as he had seen so many others do, when he had the means to save him? Years ago, Rumail had been judged b
y his own Keeper at Neskaya. He had been punished according to that verdict. The fate of his soul was in the hands of the gods and not for any man to say.
Even if it was Rumail out there, even if there had been some bad feeling between them, it all lay in the past. And whatever else Rumail might have done, he had saved Verdanta during that terrible fire. He had tried to serve his brother-king and had dealt honorably with Coryn’s family.
Deftly, Coryn shaped the laran of the circle to set up a resonant field around the injured man, sending the psychic energy he would need to pass, undamaged, from the field.
Grayness seeped across Coryn’s vision, so that for an instant he thought they had taken their force bubble into the Overworld. He blinked. The pale light disappeared and then returned, so that he knew he sensed it with his fleshly eyes.
Dawn.
He became aware of the chill running along his bones, the ache in joint and tendon from standing immobile for so long. Working as they did, they had no monitor to guard them against physical exhaustion. His clothing was damp on the inside with sweat and on the outside with moisture.
Dawn had come, and with it the gentle fall of rain. Water would wash the rest of the dust from the air. The earth was already contaminated; only time and Avarra’s blessing could cleanse it now.
Coryn opened his hands, where he had clasped those of his circle, but he did not release the joining of their minds. The bubble still held, and must continue for a little while longer. He tested it, shaped it. Gently he thinned it overhead so that it opened to the heavens.
As he did so, he reached out his mind to the valley floor, to the surrounding hills. Where the earth glowed an unnatural shade of green, men and beasts huddled, dead or dying, beyond any human help. He could not tell which side they had fought for, nor did that matter. Every living thing which could escape already had. There was no trace of the dim laran presence from last night, but no residue of death either.
We must go, too, he sent to his circle. He felt a pulse of stony endurance from Edric, shuddering exhaustion from the girl. Caitlin, who had endured years of Tower training and nights of work as exacting as this one, assented wearily.
Coryn knew he must go carefully, for an abrupt rupture of the circle might create a damaging backlash. Caitlin, sensing his caution, held the anchor point as they dropped out one by one.
Graciela whimpered, and her knees folded beneath her. She would have fallen, had not Edric caught her in his arms. “We must get her out of here,” he said, scooping her up as if she weighed no more than Taniquel’s toddler son.
Caitlin met Coryn’s eyes for a moment. The gray dawn bleached all color from her hair and face, yet softened the lines of age. She looked beautiful and eldritch as a chieri.
“You did not tell me you were a Keeper,” she said.
He started to say, I am not a Keeper, not yet. Instead, he made a comment about what a pleasure it was to work with her. She brushed it aside, descending the hill with stiff dignity toward where their horses were tethered. Before they reached Rafael’s camp, moved back another five miles, she swayed in the saddle, but never uttered a word of complaint.
Someone took Coryn’s horse and someone else brought him food. Numbly, he spooned it into his mouth. He was too drained to feel hunger, but he knew the danger of not replenishing his physical energy. At one point, Rafael appeared. Coryn remembered saying something about the bubble shield, but wasn’t sure he made sense. He was even more exhausted than when he’d fought fires across the Verdanta hills as a boy.
The day had been a victory of sorts for Hastur, for when their scouts returned from surveying the battlefield, they brought news of the numbers of Ambervale dead. Terror snaked through the Hastur camp along with the news of the virulence of the bonewater dust. The King and as many men as could travel, whole or wounded or sick with fever, withdrew even further. Even so, the tents for those exposed to the dust were set up some distance from the rest of the camp, and few of the unaffected soldiers ventured very close.
Coryn and the Hali workers spent long hours in the infirmary tents, doing what they could to help the men exposed to the dust. Injury to skin and gut, if not too great, could be stemmed until the normal healing processes took place, but they all sensed how much deeper the damage ran, right down to the very germ stuff of cells.
More men died every day, first on march and in the encampment, and then fewer died, and then none. Many of those who had been sick began to recover their appetites. They’d all lost weight as well as the hair from their heads and beards, giving them the appearance of wizened, emaciated babies.
“None of these men ought to sire children,” Coryn said quietly to Caitlin when he was sure none of their patients could overhear. They had gone walking along the perimeter of the camp in the cool of twilight.
Her eyes went gray and opaque. “I do not believe they still can.”
“Why—how could any man use such a weapon?” Coryn cried. “It is not like attacking an enemy soldier with sword or even arrows. He is a fellow fighter, he can defend himself or attack you in return. The risk is equal, or almost so. They have each chosen to fight. Their unborn children have no part in it. But Deslucido or any other tyrant can give orders from some safe place and this land will be taboo for generations. Who knows how many innocents will suffer? How? How can he do such a thing?”
Caitlin looked away, her expression desolate beyond words. “Because he can. Because he gets what he wants—and there is no one to stop him. The Hasturs have tried for years now to contain the worst of these weapons. Sometimes I wonder if it has done any good at all.” She gestured back in the direction of the contaminated valley.
“And yet,” Caitlin went on, “perhaps without that restraint, this would be commonplace. Men would become inured to horror and no longer shrink from it. Who is to say?”
“Or perhaps war has not been horrible enough,” Coryn said with sudden heat. “Perhaps the only way to end it is to make the price beyond bearing.”
“What do you mean?”
“A friend of mine once argued that the only way for two small warring kingdoms to be safe was to arm each of them with a weapon the other dared not risk. In this case, it was clingfire. What if Deslucido had known that any use of laran weapons would be met with devastating retaliation? Would he have so readily spread this obscenity we see before us if the result would be the same on his own land?”
“I cannot believe any man would risk it,” Caitlin answered. “There would be nothing left to fight over for either side. I cannot—I do not want to believe this is the only way, to arm every small kingdom with such terrible things. Sooner or later, some fool would release them upon his neighbor, perhaps for some imagined offense. Who is to say it would end there? Does clingfire or bonewater dust care whether it lands on friend or foe? Would the madness spread from one realm to another until all of Darkover is consumed? Is there no alternative?”
Coryn stared into the gathering night and prayed to whatever god would listen that there was some other way.
30
Belisar arrived at Acosta well in advance of the bulk of his retreating army, along with the handful of cavalry. Men who’d seen him ride from the border as if all of Zandru’s scorpions were on his tail had followed and become his personal bodyguard. As they passed through the encampment outside the castle gates, dogs ran barking in their path. Soldiers stopped their preparations to stare at the panting horses flecked with yellow lather, legs coated with mud from the recent rainfall.
“Belisar! Belisar has returned!”
Bells rang out from the castle and cries echoed from the battlements. Belisar lifted his head, pleased at his reception. When one or two of the soldiers stepped forward to ask their fellows, What has happened? Where is the army? he waved them away. They would learn what they needed to when the time came.
Within the gates, servants ran forward to greet the prince and his guards. Ostlers led away the horses. Belisar mounted the steps leading to the stro
nghold. He recognized Gavriel, the old counselor, now serving as coridom, who ran the place with impeccable efficiency. The old man bowed.
“Where’s my father?” Belisar strode past the opened doorway, his spurs jangling on the scrubbed stone.
“He is in his presence chamber, Your Highness. Your own is being readied for you.” Gavriel’s tone was in every way respectful. He turned, as if to lead the way.
“Later,” Belisar said, and hurried on. He waved a dismissal.
The guard bowed and made no attempt to interfere as Belisar entered without knocking. Inside, he passed through the little anteroom and burst into his father’s presence chamber. With its unlit fireplace, the place looked very much as it had in the first days at Acosta. King Damian sat at a table with two officers Belisar didn’t recognize. He looked up, and the room fell still.
“Father, I’m here. I made it back alive.”
“I see that you did.” Damian, who had been leaning over an unrolled map, straightened up. His hair was freshly trimmed, his clothing neat, his hands clean. He nodded to the officers. “Leave us.”
Damian sat back in his chair, staring, jaw set, waiting. Some dark emotion, one Belisar could not put a name to, flickered across his face. Belisar lifted his arms, then let them drop. His father had not, as he had imagined over the harried miles, been worried half to death about his fate. Instead, he was apparently carrying on as if nothing had happened. And he, Prince and heir, was expected to make his report, just as if he’d been an ordinary officer.
Belisar set his own jaw in unconscious imitation of his father. He squared his shoulders. His muscles trembled from the exertion of so many long hours at a gallop. Two horses had died under him and the third was near done in.