to go with the supplies, but in my heart I now know Owen knows, and that brings a peace for which I cannot thank you enough.”
Chapter Fifty-six
25 May 1768 Octagon Richlan, Mystria
Nathaniel hunkered down beside Kamiskwa, the two of them nestled on the lee side of a big granite outcropping. “I ain’t thinking that Rufus being right there in the middle of things is the onliest reason Prince Vlad ain’t going to be happy about this.”
Kamiskwa didn’t even nod in response. Immediately after the fight, they’d headed west and a bit north toward where Prince Vlad had predicted the Norghaest were making a magick reservoir. A half-dozen Rangers, including Justice Bone, had come with them. The Rangers remained a mile back, ready to help out if needed.
The weather had turned nasty, with storms blowing in from the northwest. They brought an unseasonable chill and dumped the sharp and icy snowflakes that heralded a long spate of winter weather. It felt like the proverbial cold day in Hell. Nathaniel wasn’t ready to bet on what would or wouldn’t happen, yet was willing to allow for things to be worse than the worst he could imagine.
He nudged Kamiskwa. “You ignoring me, or is you just froze?”
His brother turned to him with a smile. “Let me show you.” Kamiskwa scooped up a handful of new-fallen snow and made to rub it over Nathaniel’s face.
Nathaniel drew back. “Now, if this here is a way for you to wash my face with snow, I’m here to tell you I won’t be a-laughing.”
“I would teach you the magick, but it will take time.”
Nathaniel nodded. “Go ahead, then.”
Kamiskwa ran his hand across Nathaniel’s eyes. The snowflakes thinned to a single layer and locked together into a crystal lace. Light glinted from the angles, sparkling like rainbow jewels. Nathaniel glanced over and saw a fading blue glow from his friend’s hand. He was about to comment, but as he looked past him, what he saw stole his words away.
Up to that point all he had seen was Rufus in the bottom of the valley, roughly half a mile down a wooded hillside. Rufus, with the troll cavalry set up to the west, was pacing and gesticulating and acting pretty much the way Nathaniel expected a lunatic to act. He still wore his robe stripped down to the waist despite the cold. The chain scar and some new livid bruises showed up against his pale flesh. He definitely looked as if he was dying of a wasting disease, and Nathaniel’s only regret in all that was that it made him a smaller target.
All that shifted with the snowmask. First, ringing the valley, Nathaniel saw eight points at which blue-green energy flows fractured. Half of their flow poured in rainbow streams into the valley, filling it with a fog alive with vivid color, the iridescent hues of a dragonfly’s wings. The other bits traveled straightaway to more points, to join and split. From the southwest, on a direct line from the outpost, a larger energy river hit the Octagon, providing most of what was filling the basin.
As amazing as that was, it could not compare to the figures working within the energy. They appeared more substantial than the fog, yet still had a phantasmal sense about them. Rufus clearly saw them, because his words and gesticulations sent them off in various directions. They appeared to be the Norghaest of the early visions, the golden people, all young and carefree, mostly female. They flew through the fog, drawing strands of energy from the eight points of the pool itself. They established thick lines, then split them, stretching and thickening them again. They quickly framed buildings and towers, columns and porticos. The skeletal buildings they raised reminded Nathaniel of the outpost, and some of the Norghaest even bent to creating statues of tentacled creatures.
“I ain’t sure what I am seeing.”
Kamiskwa turned his back to the construction for a moment. “Obviously they are building a city-a colony. I think what they might be doing is laying it out and planning it. Then wherever they are, they will shape the pieces and, as my father did in moving us to Fort Plentiful, they will bring the city here.”
“That’s some powerful magick.”
“It is, to us. What if it’s not to them?” Kamiskwa watched again. “We would survey, then start cutting trees. You would quarry stone. We do what we do because we have the tools to do it. For them, using magick may be easier than using an ax or a hammer and chisel.”
He fell silent as one of the Norghaest, a woman, flew around and then up toward where they watched. Her long, dark hair floated gently behind her. She wore a gold loincloth and bracelets of gold, but nothing else to hide her lithe form, long legs, and soft breasts. Nathaniel thought her easily the most beautiful woman in Creation.
She landed at the hill crest, barely a dozen yards away. Rufus looked in her direction and shouted something at her. She dismissed him with a wave, then gathered power in both her hands. She brought them together, forming the energy into an indistinct ball. She patted the edges with the same sort of clumsy motions young children use when packing snow onto a snowman.
Yet at her touch, sharp details sprang out. With a few casual gestures she shaped the glowing energy into one of the squatting guardian figures from the Antediluvian ruins. It grew twelve feet tall and was nearly half that wide and deep. Its flesh rippled with scales and the muscles beneath twitched as if it were alive. Nathaniel would have sworn that the tentacles around its mouth writhed.
The woman caressed the statue’s large eyes, much in the same way that Kamiskwa had run his hand over Nathaniel’s face. In the wake of her gesture, the guardian’s eyes closed.
She sank to a crouch and moved quickly toward the two men, appearing as a ghost. As she drew close, light glinted from a simple gold circlet which had been hidden by her hair, and a slender gold chain onto which had been hung a large, dark pearl. She pulled the latter from around her neck, silently snapping the chain. She held it out clutched between forefinger and thumb, and the air around the pearl shimmered as if it was rippling water.
Kamiskwa reached out and plucked the pearl from her. Their fingers touched, just for a heartbeat. Kamiskwa gasped. He fell back and Nathaniel caught him as the woman rose into the air, then flew down into the valley once again.
Nathaniel dragged Kamiskwa down the hill and behind another snow-clad stone. “What was that?”
Kamiskwa shivered, staring at the pearl in his palm. “I do not know. I… this pearl, it is a puzzle and a key but, to what, I don’t know.” He pulled his medicine pouch from inside his clothes and slipped the pearl into it. “The sentinel statue, she’s blinded it. It won’t see us.”
“What about the other statues?”
“I don’t know.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “Why did she do that?”
“I don’t know?”
Nathaniel hauled Kamiskwa to his feet. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know.” The Shedashee shook his head. “She’s the woman I’ll make my wife, but beyond that, I don’t know.”
Wind howled outside the thaumagraph cabin. Prince Vlad nodded in Count von Metternin’s direction. “Thank you for the excellent summary of our situation.”
The plucky Kessian smiled, then painfully lowered himself into a chair. “You are most kind in letting me continue to serve you, Highness, despite my diminished capacity.”
“I cannot afford to be without your counsel.” The Prince glanced at Major Forest. “Your assessment?”
The tall, slender man from Fairlee had arrived the previous afternoon with his Ranger contingent. He leaned forward to study the map on the table before him. A hank of white hair curled down over his forehead. He swept it out of the way with his left hand, and tapped the map with the hook that replaced his right. “The Norghaest base being here would make me feel good, but the twenty miles of distance did not slow him down in hitting Fort Plentiful. Just from what I saw coming in, I doubt that if my battalion had been here, we would have made that much difference. He had the heavy troops and we did not.”
Forest glanced over at General Rathfield. “That’s not a slight on your men, General.” The Mystrian soldier ran his hook over the misshapen iron ball resting on the table. Owen had recovered it after the battle. The hook bumped over the knuckle and finger impressions stamped into the cannon ball. “Being able to do this to an iron ball makes
