Страница 49 из 125
“I wouldn’t dream of trying if it wasn’t,” said Allin hastily.
They stood, hedged round with silence, faint noises from gatehouse and residence floating past on the cooling evening air.
“By all means weave your magic,” Temar said abruptly. He took a deep breath as Allin closed her soft hands tight around a faint spark of unearthly blue light, an expression of utmost concentration dignifying her round face.
Magecraft is a practical art, Temar reminded himself, well-understood means of manipulating the stuff of creation that generations of wizards have studied and codified. Casuel had told him all about it. Temar didn’t have to understand, it was sufficient that these wizards did. It’s not Artifice, he thought, gritting his teeth. It’s no enchantment wrought inside a man’s head and working its will, holding him helpless to resist.
“There,” Allin breathed.
Temar opened his eyes. “Everything looks much the same,” he said for want of anything better.
“What about your hands?” giggled Allin.
Temar raised one, seeing only a dim outline of his fingers. He looked down and the rest of his body was no more than a faint suggestion in the gathering dusk. Gripping his sword hilt hastily, he was relieved to feel that as hard and reassuring as ever. He realised Allin was looking him straight in the eye. “You can see me thus?” He’d be hard pressed to sneak through the gatehouse if he were no more than an Eldritch-man’s shade.
“You look like a shadow to me, and to any other mage, I’m afraid, but no one not mage-born will see anything.” Allin looked a little downcast. “It’s the best I can do.”
Temar nodded decisively. “It is a marvel, my lady wizard.”
Allin ducked her head to hide a pleased smile. “Stay close behind me, and hope we don’t run into Casuel.”
Temar laughed. “He went out to invite himself to some gathering of mages. It is wherever Velindre is going, I believe.”
“Be quiet,” Allin hushed him as they stepped out on to the empty sweep in front of the gatehouse.
Temar chewed at the inside of his cheek, carefully matching his steps to Allin’s, especially when they reached flagstones where his hard boots could make far more noise than her soft shoes.
“Good evening, my lady,” called the Sergeant reading his broadsheet in the lodge.
Startled, Allin stopped. Temar promptly bumped into her. Allin managed to stifle her exclamation, but as she moved her cloak pulled her up short. Temar realised he was standing on the hem and hastily lifted his foot.
“Fair Festival, my lady,” said one of the recognised men guarding the postern. Temar found his sly suggestiveness faintly offensive.
Allin nodded curtly to the two youths. Temar pressed close to her, holding his breath and keeping arms and elbows close, lest he nudge someone.
As he stepped through the postern his sword caught against the wood and dragged round. Balancing it on his hip took Temar a moment and he caught a brief exchange on the inside of the door.
“Been visiting the young D’Alse
“What’s he see in that dumpling? He’s got his pick of the Demoiselles.”
“To marry maybe, but what about a little Festival jig? I’ll bet a wizard wouldn’t have cold hands for your fiddlestick.”
Temar strode hastily after Allin, feeling his cheeks burning with a colour every bit as fiery as her habitual blush.
She had halted to look vaguely at a gig trotting round a distant corner. “Are you all right?” she whispered.
“Quite, yes.” Temar gratefully realised the invisibility hid his embarrassment.
“You’d better stay behind me,” she murmured as she walked slowly down the long slope towards the conduit house.
Temar did as he was bid, careful he didn’t step on Allin’s cloak again. At least there were precious few people out walking and those mostly looked to be liveried servants intent on their own tasks. The last daylight was fading now, and the dusk beneath the shade trees made Temar’s feet even more indistinct to his straining eyes. He stopped, rubbing his eyes, taking a deep breath then hurrying after Allin.
Turning at the conduit house, she headed north and west along the circular road. Coaches swept past them, but hardly anyone else was on foot. Allin strode on, ignoring superior glances from passing carriages until she finally turned down into a busy thoroughfare. The air was cooling now but the stone buildings all around were casting the remembered heat of the day back into the night sky along with the exuberant clamour of the crowd.
Temar had to press close behind Allin, their progress increasingly awkward, Temar looking up and down at every other step, searching for his feet no darker than wisps of smoke. The lesser moon rose over the rooftops, golden circle all but full and unchallenged by the merest arc raised by her greater sister. But Temar had no time for such fancies as the moonlight cast queasy shadows through the hazy darkness that was all he could see of himself. Something in the back of his mind was protesting ever louder that what his eyes were telling him couldn’t possibly be the truth.
He caught Allin’s elbow, steering her irresistibly into a noisome alley. “You have to undo the magic, else I will be sick.” He swallowed hard on nausea thickening his throat.
Allin immediately spread her hands in a decisive gesture. Sapphire light came and went at the edge of Temar’s vision like a jewelled memory of the day and he could see his hands again. “My thanks,” he said with heartfelt sincerity.
“If you’re done, move on, will you?” A man about Temar’s age shifted impatiently from one foot to the other at the entrance to the alley, a slightly older woman on his arm, eyes cynical in her painted face.
“Did they see anything?” whispered Allin.
“There’s nothing I’ve not seen, blossom,” said the woman with a coarse chuckle.
Temar drew a mortified breath, uncertain how to respond. Allin giggled and slid her arm inside his. “We’re nearly there.”
As the road forked either side of an ancient shrine, Allin led Temar up an avenue of lime trees spreading a moist green scent. Mismatched buildings jostled a run of tall, narrow houses with proudly precise gables looking down on the six-sided chimneys of lower dwellings with narrow leaded windows and uneven rooflines.
“It should be down there,” said Allin uncertainly. Bright lights beckoned at the bottom of a small entry, too short to be a street, too wide to be an alley. Lively chatter lilting with unmistakably Lescari accents echoed from an open window.
“Yes, look.” Allin pointed with relief at the great half-circle lock hanging from a sturdy chain above the door. It was all that distinguished the building from its neighbours, each with irregular windows beneath a dishevelled roof of stone slates, oaken beams set for no readily apparent reason in walls crumbling with age and inattention.
Temar drew his arm close to his side to shield Allin with his greater height. “I have not spent any great time in taverns,” he said cautiously. Not this side of the ocean, not since waking from enchantment, he amended silently to himself. Riotous evenings carousing with Vahil so long ago, not a care between them, counted for nothing now.
But they’d never have come to such a sober house, little changed from the dwelling it had once been. Two casks of ale were set on trestles in a parlour furnished with cast-offs from people who could have had precious little to start with. There were no potmen or maids that Temar could see, just an unhurried matron filling a steady flow of jugs brought by men and women in sombre, well-worn clothes who either sat near by or disappeared into the back of the building.
Four newcomers pressed past Temar and Allin as they hesitated on the threshold. Greeting the mistress of the house in Toremal-accented Lescari, two lads took tankards from a rack beside one door for their ale while the others helped themselves to glasses and a flat-bottomed greenish bottle, dropping silver and copper coin into an open box. A crone sewing a slow seam by the table nodded, her smile shrunken around toothless gums.