to steer him. If you want him to go faster, nudge him in the ribs
with your heels. If you want him to slow down, pull back on
the reins a little bit. If you want him to stop, pull back a little
harder. That pack saddle’s not going to be very comfortable, so
let us know if you start getting stiff and sore. We’ll stop and get
off and walk for a while. You’ll get used to it after a few days
– if we’ve got that far to travel.’
She held out her hands, crossed at the wrist. ‘Wilt thou bind
me now, Sir Knight?’
‘What for?’
‘I am thy prisoner.’
‘Don’t be silly. You won’t be able to hold on if your hands
are tied.’ He set his jaw, reached out and took her by the
waist. Then he lifted her easily up onto the patient pack horse.
Then he held out his hands and looked at them. ‘So far so
good,’ he said. ‘At least my fingernails haven’t fallen off. I’ll be
right beside you, so if you feel yourself starting to slip, let me
know.’
‘We always underestimate him,’ Vanion murmured to
Sparhawk. ‘There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye, isn’t there?’
‘Kalten? Oh yes, my Lord. Kalten can be very complicated
sometimes. ‘
They rode away from their fortified cave and followed the
gorge the river had cut down through the rock. Sparhawk and
Vanion led the way with Kalten and their hostage riding close
behind them. Sephrenia, her face coldly set, rode at the rear
with Berit, keeping as much distance as possible between herself
and Xanetia.
‘Is it very far?’ Kalten asked the pale woman at his side. ‘I
mean, how many days will it take us to get there?’
‘The distance is indeterminate, Sir Kalten,’ Xanetia replied,
‘and the time as well. The Delphae are outcast and despised. We
would be unwise to make the location of the valley of Delphaeus
widely known.’
‘We’re used to traveling, Lady,’ Kalten told her, ‘and we
always pay attention to landmarks. If you take us to Delphaeus,
we’ll be able to find it again. All we’d have to do is find that
cave and start from there.’
‘That is the flaw in thy plan, Sir Knight,’ she said gently.
‘Thou couldst consume a lifetime in the search for that cave. It
is our wont to conceal the approaches to Delphaeus rather than
Delphaeus itself.’
‘it’s a little hard to conceal a whole mountain range,
isn’t it?’
‘We noted that self-same thing ourselves, Sir Kalten,’ she
replied without so much as a smile, ‘so we conceal the sky
instead. Without the sun to guide thee, thou art truly lost.’
‘Could you do that, Sparhawk?’ Kalten raised his voice
slightly. ‘Could you make the whole sky overcast like that?’
‘Could we?’ Sparhawk asked Vanion.
‘I couldn’t. Maybe Sephrenia could, but under the circumstances
it might not be a good idea to ask her. I know enough
to know that it’s against the rules, though. We’re not supposed
to play around with the weather.’
‘We do not in truth cloud the sky, Lord Vanion,’ Xanetia
assured him. ‘We cloud thine eyes instead. We can, an we
choose, make others see what we wish them to see.’
‘Please, Anarae,’ Ulath said with a pained look, ‘don’t go into
too much detail. You’ll bring on one of those tedious debates
about illusion and reality, and I really hate those.’
They rode on with the now unobscured sun clearly indicating
their line of travel. They were moving somewhat northeasterly.
Kalten watched their prisoner (or captor) closely, and he called
a halt somewhat more frequently than he might normally have
done. When they stopped, he helped the strange pale woman
down from her horse and walked beside her as they continued
on foot, leading their horses.
‘Thou art overly solicitous of my comfort, Sir Kalten,’ she
gently chided him.
‘Oh, it’s not for you, Lady,’ he lied. ‘The going’s a bit steep
here, and we don’t want to exhaust the horses.’
‘There’s definitely more to Kalten than I’d realized,’ Vanion
muttered to Sparhawk.
‘You can spend a whole lifetime watching somebody, my
friend, and you still won’t learn everything there is to know
about him.’
‘What an astonishingly acute perception,’ Vanion said dryly.
‘Be nice,’ Sparhawk murmured.
Sparhawk was troubled. While Xanetia was certainly not as
skilled as Aphrael, it was clear that she was tampering with time
and distance in the same way the Child Goddess did. If she had
maintained the illusion of an overcast sky, he might not have
noticed, but the position of the sun clearly indicated that there
were gaps in his perception of time. The sun does not normally
jump as it moves across the sky. The troubling fact was not that
Xanetia did it badly, but the fact that she did it at all. Sparhawk
began to revise a long-held opinion. This ‘tampering’ was obviously
not a purely divine capability. Itagne’s rather sketchy discourse
on the Delphae had contained at least some elements of
truth. There was indeed such a thing as ‘Delphaeic magic’, and
so far as Sparhawk could tell, it went further and into areas
where Styrics were unable or unwilling to venture.
He kept his eyes open, but did not mention his observations
to his friends.
And then, on a perfect autumn evening, when the birds
clucked and murmured sleepily in the trees and a luminous
twilight turned the mountains purple around them, they rode
up a narrow, rocky trail that wound around massive boulders
toward a V-shaped notch high above. Xanetia had been most
insistent that they not stop for the night, and she and Kalten
had pressed on ahead. Her normally placid face seemed somehow
alight with anticipation.
When she and her protector reached the top of the trail, they
stopped and sat on their horses, starkly outlined against the last
rosy vestiges of the sunset.
‘Dear’ God.’ Kaltten exclaimed. ‘Sparhawk, come up and look
at this!’
Sparhawk and Vanion rode on up to join them.
‘There was a valley below, a steep, basin-like mountain valley
with dark trees covering the slopes. There were houses down
there, close-packed houses with candlelit windows and with
columns of pale blue smoke rising straight up into the evening
air from innumerable chimneys. The fact that there was a fairsized
town this deep in the inaccessible mountains was surprising
enough, but Sparhawk and the others were not looking at
the town.
In the very center of the valley, there was a small lake. There
was, of course, nothing unusual about that. Lakes abound in
mountains in all parts of the world. The spring run-off from
%melting snow inevitably seeks valleys and ha~ins – any place
that is lower than the surrounding terrain and from which there
is no exit channel. It was not the fact that the lake was there
that was so surprising. The thing that startled them and raised
those vestigial hackles of superstitious awe along the back~ of
their necks was the fact that the lake glowed in the lowering
twilight.
The light was not the sickly, greenish glow of the phosphorescence
that is sometimes exuded by rotting vegetable matter,
but was instead a clear, stealy white. Like a lost moon,
the lake glowed, responding to the light of her new-risen sister
standing above the eastern horizon.
‘Behold Delphaeus,’ Xanetia said simply, and when they
looked at her, they saw that she too was all aglow with a pure
white light that seemed to come from within her and which
shone through her garment and through her skin itself as if that
pale, unwavering light were coming from her very soul.
CHAPTER 14
Sparhawk’s senses were preternaturally acute for some reason,
although his mind seemed detached and emotionless. He
observed, he heard, he catalogued, but he felt nothing. The peculiar
state was not an unfamiliar one, but the circumstances under
which this profound calm had come over him were unusual very
unusual. There were no armed men facing him, and yet
his mind and body were preparing for battle.
Faran tensed, bunching his muscles, and the sound of his
steel-shod hooves altered very slightly, becoming somehow
more crisp, more deliberate. Sparhawk touched the big roan’s
neck with one hand. ‘Relax,’ he murmured. ‘i’ll let you know
when the time comes.’
Faran shuddered, absently flicking his Master’s reassurance
off like a bothersome insect and continuing his cautious pace.
Vanion looked at his friend questioningly.
‘Faran’s being a little sensitive, my Lord.’
‘Sensitive? That ill-tempered brute?’
‘Faran doesn’t really deserve that reputation, Vanion. When
you get right down to it, he’s a good-natured horse. He tries
very hard to please me. We’ve been together for so long that he
knows what I’m feeling most of the time, and he goes out of
his way to match his attitude to mine. I’m the one who’s the
ill-tempered brute, but he gets all the blame. He behaves like a