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

At least.  Any more and she risked killing him.  She wondered if it were the correct potion after all?  Perhaps it wasn’t an accelerant but a sedative instead.  In her panic she had administered the wrong mixture.  No, she was sure of the marking on the jar and besides she carried but one other container and that was filled with shavings of herbal leaves, impossible to mistake.

Maybe the liquid had lost some of its potency, she began to think, when Daaynan’s eyelids fluttered and slowly opened.  He gazed up at her, his eyes ablaze with whatever fever had gripped him yet overlaid with a new intelligence, a fresh clarity.  They fixed on her, filling with recognition.

“Thank the Gods,” she breathed, shakily.  A tear rolled down from the edge of her eye onto his face.  He wiped it away abstractly.

“Is it over?” he asked.

She laughed, unable to help herself, her entire being flooding with relief.  “No, Druid.  It’s just begun.”

29.

The evening sky brightened over the Gardens of Reflection as the moon seemed to swell over the city, bathing the gardens in a dim pool of light, reflecting off the bright surfaces that filled the urban park.  The white flowers that lined the many walkways.  The cultivated hedgerows framing the edge of the gardens with their broad yellow leaves.  Surface water from the large ponds that interrupted the numerous paths that crisscrossed the park.

Standing outside the old palace remains that had been converted to a spice market was the caretaker Toc, his tools gathered in a shunt-bag strapped over one shoulder.  He had finished his daily chores hours ago yet had wanted to remain in the gardens for reasons he couldn’t have explained, least of all to himself.  Whatever they were, they were important enough for him not to go home at the end of his shift as he regularly did.  Something was happening in the city tonight.  There was that storm a day or so ago.  The over-bright moon tonight.  The air of restlessness that hung suspended over Brinemore like a portend bringing fulfilment to an odd prophecy he vaguely remembered.  He was no prophet, yet he was tied to the land in the way an ordinary citizen was not, and as such was sensitive to changes that imposed themselves on it, appear as they might in the form of seasonal weather or man’s intervention, read in the air or a man’s look and felt in the shift of ancient leylines that crossed and touched beneath the earth.  Both his father and grandfather had tended the gardens (though it was said he was the most gifted of the three, sometimes even able to ‘far see’ as they termed it) and he supposed he had inherited this understanding from them.  His intuition, however, told him this was different.  What would happen here tonight came from another source that lay beyond ordinary understanding.  How could he go home now and miss whatever it was that was about to happen?

The moonlight reflected shimmering movement close to the boundary of the palace’s smaller garden and the avenue beyond it.  People, hundreds if not thousands of them, in bright citizen’s robes coming toward him, their trailing cloaks billowing in a rush of sudden wind.  They passed between the guards on the night watch, through the vaulted iron gates that loomed over the park, walking calmly to where he stood, their features as they approached still and prescient, as if they bore a gentle warning over which he should not greatly trouble himself.

“Who passes here at this time of night?” he demanded querulously, spying into their number, recognising at least one face from those now massed around him.  “Lud, is that you?  What’s happened?  Has there been an emergency?  Talk to me, fellow!”

Lud appeared to consider his question, untroubled by any urgency of response.  Those beside him began to whisper slowly, persuading him of something.  He then nodded, as if confirming a decision, walking to one side of a breach that had opened up in the crowd.  A man walked through the breach, a tall man wearing a sentry officer’s uniform though something about him was at odds with the guard’s clothing.  He lifted one hand at him, in greeting he supposed, though the gesture was made with a casual arrogance Toc did not like.  There was a pale animation to his face and you could see veins and muscles beat and stretch beneath the skin; with the icy hauteur in his expression, he looked like a regal spectre.

“Hail, fellow,” the spectre said.  “Come join us.”

Toc offered the other a slanted look.  “And who would you be, now?”

“I am the Raja Iridis, and these,” he indicated the thousands gathered with a broad sweep of his arm that carried the same lazily arrogant motion, “are my subjects.”

Toc glanced disbelievingly at the crowd, permitting himself a look of mild wonderment as he began to recognise more of them.  “Are they indeed?”  He turned to them.  “Set?  Vash?  Is that you?  This is a funny day on the farm.  What’s been happening here?”  But the men he addressed did not respond, only gazed blankly ahead at some point beyond him.

He focused on Iridis once more.  “What have you done t...” he began, but before he could finish the words a number of them had closed the remaining distance between them, moving quicker than his eye could follow, grasping him tight around the arms, shoulders and waist, holding him fast.  The spectre walked slowly up to him, smiling.  He/it reached out and gripped his neck and Toc instantly went numb.  His mind and body froze in mid-thought/action, his last feeling- though it had more the shade of an impulse- that he was caught in the thrall of this being and thus had an answer to his question.  A final remnant of instinct told him that, gifted as he was, even he could not have seen this coming.

“LONGFELLOW ISN’T AROUND- my guess is he’s fled the city.  Are