The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (small books to read .TXT) 📗

knew.  He considered the idea that it might have been a mistake to come here in the first place.

Something tugged at the corner of his vision.  He turned back to the spot where the King had been resting and found it empty.  He walked away from it, moving slowly around in each direction, and spotted him twenty feet away, bent forward against one of the pillars, lost in concentration.  He sensed Daaynan’s attention somehow and turned to face him.

“This is a way station, Druid.  You have brought me to an in-between place.  What manner of sorcery is it you possess?”

“What have you learned about the temple?”

“The temple is it?  It stores an infinite variety of what it calls systems, each one different from the next.  It calls forth souls from each, those whose stay has ended.”

“You’re in communication with it?”

“It speaks to me, as all life must.”  The King turned from his concentration on the pillar, regarding him with a bitter expression.  There were lines on his face that had not been there earlier, the life energy that animated his expression spent of force by his stay in the temple.  Daaynan stepped back from the other, not trusting him.  It could be that he too was weakened here but it was good to be cautious.  He did not seem able to summon fire but there were other ways to present a threat and in his own way the Druid felt that the King’s power was at least the equal of his own.

“What does it tell you?” he enquired.

Iridis smiled, and Daaynan glimpsed piece of what the King was made of beneath that smile, something of a gruesome countenance that lurked in the shadow of the expression that hid it.  Not a human countenance but one of a devil of some making, devoid of temperance or mercy, holding dark virtues in restraint for what it lacked in compassion or shared feeling.  Long moments spent under the gaze of that stare, he felt, would drive an individual mad.

Without dwelling on the matter, Daaynan turned to the pillar nearest him and dove inside the light that composed it, meaning to leave the creature behind.  As he moved, however, his shoulder fell numb with shock and as he turned back to investigate the source of the feeling he could see that the other had reached out and caught a section of his broad-cloak.  Together they tumbled through the light, Daaynan attempting to writhe free of the King’s grip.  He turned inside the spin, managing- unfathomably- to grasp a welt of his cloak and tear it free.  The other faded from his vision, absorbed by the light as it receded and the structure of this world into which he had entered imposed its own surroundings.  It all happened blindingly quickly and would not have happened at all had the Druid not acted without thinking.

When the surroundings of the world he had entered imposed themselves fully he found he was standing at the edge of a cove, the waves of some foreign tide lapping at his boots.  There was a lagoon near the end of a shore, and beyond it were buildings of a description, small and similar in shape and size yet extravagant looking.  The detail was fine, the buildings composed of a material he did not recognise.  This was no time to study the scenery, he decided.  He quickly looked around, hoping to find a plinth like the one in the King’s world on which the buttons would be mounted.  There was nothing of the kind for as far as he could see in any direction he chose to look.  There was simply land and sea and banks of earth leading back into fields, a number of which were manicured like the gardens of Fein Mor that rolled away toward the horizon where a fading blue sky gladdened distant treetops.

There was a figure standing, no walking along inside the shallow lagoon, its head bent low, moving in a fashion so dejected it was striking in its isolation.  It was a young man, headed not toward the buildings at this time of the evening- if time could be marked in the usual way here, and he supposed it could not- but further out to sea.  The Druid studied him for a moment, conscious that he had little time in this place, the cold numbing in his shoulder serving him as a reminder of that fact.  He had broken free of the other, not knowing if Iridis had entered this world with him.  He sensed however that he was close by.  He knew what he must now do, and without the help of the shields that drew people from each world into the temple.  His magic could do that- green fire that drew matter and energy into the real world from another; what it really did, he thought- no, hoped- was draw matter including people from the world he was in to the one he had come from.  The idea that the Northern Earth was for the time being no longer his home ought not to change the way his sorcery worked, yet the knowledge sat heavy with him. No matter.  He brushed his feelings aside and started out toward the young man.

As he approached, someone emerged from one of the buildings.  Two someones.  The first was an elderly woman, dressed in strange yet fine clothes that were somehow ill befitting a formal occasion.  She cried out “Christopher!”  The young man for whom the warning was clearly intended did not look up.  He continued walking in a crooked line, his head bent low in some private stupor.  He was as unobservant to what was happening as Iridis’s skeleton had been.  Daaynan understood.  The life, or most of its force, had been taken from this Christopher just as it had been from the King. He was dying or already dead.  Their time in their respective worlds had come to an end, as would his if he did