Winds of Change Read online

  He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair. He felt his shoulders slumping, and remembered that it made a poor impression of strength, but he knew Kethra would see through any attempts to hide his emotions, either by words or body language. He closed his eyes. “I had thought so, but I had not liked to believe it. Father has always been so - strong. He has always recovered quickly from things. Are you quite certain of this?”

  A deep, somewhat strained male voice spoke from behind them.

  “You must believe it, my son,” said Starblade. Darkwind jerked his head up and turned to face him. Starblade wore a thin, loose-cut resting-gown that Songwind . . . Darkwind had designed for him a decade ago. The Adept walked slowly into the clearing, and now that he knew the truth, Darkwind saw the traces of severe damage done to him, physically as well as mentally.

  Starblade found a space beside Kethra and joined her. “You must. I am but a shadow of what I was. In fact,” he chuckled as if he found the idea humorous, “I have considered changing my use-name to Starshadow. Except that we already have a Shadowstar, and that would be confusing for everyone.”

  Darkwind clenched his hands. It wasn’t easy hearing Starblade confess to weakness; it was harder hearing him admit to such profound weakness that he’d thought of altering his use-name. That implied a lasting condition, as when Songwind had become Darkwind, and sometimes an irreparable condition.

  Starblade sat carefully down beside the shaman, and took her hand in his. His left hand - the one that Darkwind had pierced with his dagger as part of his father’s freeing from Mornelithe Falconsbane. It showed a glossy, whitened scar a half-thumblength long now that the bandages had been removed. “I hope that you and I have reconciled our differences, my son,” he said, as Darkwind tried not to squirm, “because I must tell you that I do not trust my decision-making ability any more than I can rely on my faded powers.”

  Darkwind started to blurt out a protest; his father stopped him. “Oh, not for the small decisions, the everyday matters. But for the decisions that affect us all deeply - and the ones I made in the past - I do not feel that I can continue without another view to temper mine. In our Healings, I see my actions laid on bare earth, without order. As I am rebuilt, Kethra helps me to understand the motivations behind those actions, and reject those that Falconsbane engineered. It is a slow process, Darkwind. I do not know which of the decisions I have made were done out of pride, out of good judgment, or out of the direction of our enemies. I need you, my son; I need your vision, and I need your newly regained powers. More so: k’Sheyna needs them.”

  Now Darkwind was numb. At the moment, all he could do was to nod. But this - this was frightening, inconceivable. Even at his worst, when Starblade had been trying to thwart him at every turn, he had been in control, he had been powerful. He had been someone who at least could be relied upon to know what he was doing, a bastion of strength. Full of certainty.

  This was like hearing that the rock beneath the Vale was sand, and that the next storm could wash it away.

  Kethra and Starblade both were waiting for some kind of response, so he got himself under some semblance of control, and gave them one. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.

  “I want your opinions, your thoughts,” Starblade told him, his lined and weary face showing every day of his age. “I need them. The most pressing concern is the Heartstone; what do you think we should do about it? You know enough to make some educated guesses about it. We cannot stabilize it, not without help. I do not think that we can drain it, either. When we try, it fluxes unpredictably. And after you have given me your opinion, I want your help in doing whatever it is that we must to end this trouble - I want you to take my place as the key of the Adepts’ circle.”

  He shook his head at that, violently. “Father, I can’t. I haven’t even begun to relearn all I’ve forgotten and - ”

  “The strength of your will and youth will counter that lack of practice,” Kethra said, interrupting him. “The key need not be the most experienced Adept, but he must be the strongest, and you are that.”

  Starblade coughed, then settled himself, fixing Darkwind with a sincere look. “I will explain it to you in this light, then. Your mother and I raised you to be a strong and responsible person, Scout or Mage. Now, the strength that I taught you has been taken from me. You are at least in part the vessel of my old personality. I would appreciate relearning what I was from you, and learning your strength.”

  Given a choice, he would have told them it was impossible; turned and fled from the Vale, back to his ekele. But he had no choice, and all three of them knew that. He bowed to their will. “If that is truly what you want,” he said unhappily. “If it is, then I shall.”

  “Thank you,” Starblade said, simply. As Kethra stood up, he rose to his feet to place one hand on his son’s shoulder. “This - confession has cost me a great deal, but I think it has gained me more. I have given over wanting you to be a copy of me, and I wish that Wintermoon and I had not drifted so far apart that I cannot say those same words to him and be believed. Perhaps in time, he will not be lost to me. I do not wish you to be anything but yourself, Darkwind. Whatever comes of this, it will have happened because you went to the limit of your abilities, and not the sum of my expectations. In all that happens, I shall try to be your friend as well as your father.”

  With those words, which surprised him more than anything else that had happened tonight, Starblade turned and walked slowly back into the shadows, with Kethra at his side.

  Vree swooped down off his perch, and backwinged to a new one beside his bondmate. He swiveled his head, turning it upside down to stare at Darkwind from a new angle, as only a raptor would do. Hard to manage, with his crop bulging as if the bird had swallowed a child’s ball. And possibly the silliest pose any bird could take.

  :Sleepy,: he announced. :Sleep now?:

  Darkwind held out his gauntlet automatically, and Vree swiveled his head back and hopped onto his bondmate’s wrist. :I think so,: he replied, absently, all the while wondering if, after all this, he still could get to sleep.

  He flailed up out of slumber, arms windmilling wildly, with sparkling afterimages of confused dream-scenes still in his mind and the impression of someone shaking him.

  Someone was shaking him. “What?” he gasped.

  “Who?” The hammock-bed beneath him felt strange, the proportions of the room all wrong.

  Light flared, and he blinked, dazzled; the shaker was Sathen, the hertasi who usually tended Starblade’s ekele for him. The little lizard was holding a lit lantern in one claw, with the other on Darkwind’s shoulder. And the proportions of the room were wrong because he was not in his own ekele, he was in Starblade’s, in the guest quarters. Vree dozed on, oblivious, on a block-perch set into the wall, one foot pulled up under his breast-feathers and his head hunched down so far there was nothing visible in the soft puif of white and off-white but a bit of beak.

  I need to find Father a new bondbird, came the inconsequential thought, as Sathen waited patiently for him to gather his wits and say something sensible.

  “What?” he obliged, finally. “What’s wrong?”

  “Trouble,” the little hertasi whispered. “Trouble-call it is, from Snowstar. Needing mage. Needing mages,” he corrected. “More than one.”

  Marvelous. Well, I’m probably the least weary. “What for?” he asked. It couldn’t be for combat; by the time he reached Snowstar’s patrol area, any combat would have been long since resolved. He reached for his clothing and pulled on his breeches. Well, at least this means that someone else will have to take our patrol in the morning. And I don’t have to be the one to decide who it is.

  “Basilisk,” Sathen said, his nostrils closing to slits as he said it. The lizard-folk did not like basilisks - not that anyone did, but basilisks seemed to prefer hertasi territories over any others.

  Darkwind groaned, and pulled his tunic over his head, thinking as quickly as his sleep-fogged min
d would permit. “Go leave a message for Winterlight that - ah - Wingsister Elspeth and I went out to deal with the basilisk, and he’ll have to get someone else on day-watch to cover for us. Then go wake up the Outlander and tell her I’ll be coming for her in a moment.”

  Fortunately Elspeth’s ekele was not that far from Starblade’s. She wasn’t going to like being awakened out of a sound sleep - but then, who did? She took the oath, he told himself a little smugly as he pulled on his boots. He splashed water from the basin Sathen had left onto his face to wake himself up. She might as well find out what it means.

  Besides, being shaken awake in the middle of the night might also shake up that attitude problem of hers. And once she saw a basilisk for herself, he had a shrewd notion that she might start paying better attention to him when he told her something. Particularly about the dangers that lurked out in the Uncleansed Lands, and how you couldn’t always deal with them combatively.

  This would be a good exercise in patience for her, as well; now that he thought about it, he realized he couldn’t have planned this encounter more effectively.

  Other than staging it by daylight instead of darkness.

  For a basilisk could not be moved by magic power - it grounded attacks out on itself, sent the power out into the earth, and ignored the attackers. And it could not be moved by force.

  It could only be dealt with by persuasion. And a great deal of patience, as Elspeth would likely discover the hard way.

  He took the gracefully curved stairs down to the ground, jumping them two at a time, suppressing the urge to whistle.

  This promised to be very, very entertaining.

  It was not just any basilisk. It was a basilisk with a belly full of eggs.

  Snowstar held his torch steady, no doubt trusting in the cold to keep the creature torpid. It blinked at them from the hollow it had carved for itself in the rocky bank of the stream, but remained where it was. Torchlight flickering over the thing’s head and parts of its body did nothing to conceal how hideous the poor creature was.

  “Havens, that thing is ugly,” Elspeth said in a fascinated whisper. Basilisks came in many colors - all the colors of mud, from the dull red-brown of Plains-mud, to the dull brown-black of forest-loam mud, and every muddy variation in between. This one was the muddy gray-green of clay. With the face of a toad, no neck to speak of, the body of an enormous lizard, a dull ash-gray frill running down the head and the length of the spine and tail, a mouth full of poisonous half-rotted teeth, and a slack jaw that continuously leaked greenish drool, it was definitely not going to appeal to anything outside of its own kind. And when you added to that the sanitary habits of a maggot, and breath that would make an enraged bull keel over a hundred paces away, you did not have anything that could be considered a good neighbor.

  And that was when it was torpid. As soon as the sun arose, and warmed the thing’s sluggish blood, it would go looking for food. It wasn’t fussy. Anything would do, living or dead, so long as it was meat.

  But as soon as the blood warmed up, the brain would warm up, too - and when that happened, nothing nearby would be safe. Not that the basilisk was clever; it wasn’t - it wasn’t fast either, or a crafty hunter. It didn’t have to be. It simply had to feel hunger and look around for food, and everything within line-of-sight would freeze, held in place by the peculiar mental compulsion it emitted.

  Then it could simply stroll up to its chosen dinner, and eat it.

  As Snowstar explained this to Elspeth, Darkwind created a heatless mage-light and sent it into the basilisk’s shelter, so he could get a better idea of how big it was. Elspeth shuddered in revulsion as the light revealed just how phenomenally hideous the creature was.

  “Are we going to kill it now?” she asked; Darkwind had the feeling that she wanted to get this over with quickly. Well, he didn’t blame her. Being downwind of a basilisk was a lot like being downwind of a channel pit.

  Snowstar answered for him. “Gods of our fathers, no!” he exclaimed. “If you think it stinks now, you don’t want to be within two days’ ride of a dead one! That’s assuming we could kill it. It has three hearts, that warty skin is tougher than twenty layers of boiled hide, and it can live for a long time with what we’d consider a fatal wound. It can live without two legs, both eyes, and half its face. Altogether. Assuming you could get near enough to it to take out an eye. Personally, I’d rather not try.”

  Elspeth shook her head, not in disbelief, but in amazement. “What about magic?”

  “Magic doesn’t work on them,” Darkwind told her, as he reckoned up the length of the beast and judged it to be about the size of three horses, not counting the tail. “It just passes around them and goes straight into the ground. We should have shields like that! An amazing animal.”

  “You sound like you admire it,” Elspeth replied in surprise.

  He shrugged, and walked around a little, to see if the basilisk noticed him, or if it had gone completely torpid. “In a way I do,” he said, noting with satisfaction that the creature’s eyes tracked on him. “It is said that they were created by one of the Great Mages, not as a weapon, but as a way of disposing of the carcasses of those creatures that were weapons, that even dead were too dangerous to touch and too deadly to leave about. Nothing else will eat a dead cold-drake, for instance.” His brief survey complete, he returned to Elspeth’s side. “They weren’t supposed to be able to breed, but neither were a lot of other creatures. Most of their eggs are infertile, but there are one or two that are viable now and again.”

  He turned to Snowstar. The scout wiped the back of his hand across his watering eyes, and stood a little straighter. Snowstar was one of the youngest of the scouts; Darkwind was grateful that he had known enough to send for help and not attempted to move the basilisk himself. It could be done without magic, but the odds of success, especially in the uncertain weather of fall or spring, were not good. “Have you found any place for us to put her?” he asked.

  “Yes, but it’s not as secure as I’d like,” the scout replied, wiping his eyes again. The wind had turned, and the fumes were - potent. Darkwind’s eyes had started to burn a few moments ago, and Snowstar had been here for some time. Small wonder he had watering eyes. “I’ve got a rock-bottomed gully along this stream; the sides are too steep to climb and there’s always lots of things falling into it to die. The only problem is that the mouth of the valley is open to the stream, and I couldn’t see a way to close it off.”

  “Isn’t there a swamp somewhere off that way?” Darkwind asked, waving vaguely in the direction where he thought he sensed water.

  “Can you get the thing that far?” Snowstar asked, incredulously. “If you can, that would be perfect. There’s plenty for it to eat, no hertasi like it because it’s full of sulfur springs, and the sulfur’s enough to make sure any eggs it lays won’t hatch.”

  “If we can get it moving, we can get it that far,” Dark-wind told him. “The problem is going to be getting it moving without getting it worked up enough to think about being angry or frightened. If it’s either, it’ll start trying to fascinate everything within line of sight.”

  “Right.” Snowstar spread his hands. “I’ll leave that up to you. Get it moving and I’ll guide you to the nearest finger of the swamp and make sure nothing interferes with you on the way.”

  “That will do.” Darkwind studied the hideous beast, trying to determine whether it was better to lure it out of its rudimentary den, or force it out.

  Force it out, he decided at last. He didn’t think that the beast was going to take any kind of bait at the moment.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, turning to Elspeth, who still watched the basilisk with a kind of repulsed fascination. “It’s comfortable and it feels secure in that den. You and I are going to have to make it feel uncomfortable and insecure, and make it come out. Once it’s out, it will try to go back in again; we’ll have to prevent that. Then we’ll have to herd it in the direction we want it to go
.”

  Elspeth licked her lips and nodded, slowly. “We use magic, I presume?”

  “That, or mind-magic, or a combination of the two,” he told her. He yawned as he finished the sentence, and hoped he wasn’t going to be too fuddled from lack of sleep to carry this off. Elspeth looked as if she felt about the same. “Got any ideas about what might drive it out?”

  She leaned back against a tree trunk and frowned at the beast. “Well, what would drive you or me out of bed? Noise?”

  Interesting idea. “That’s one nobody I know of has tried.” He thought for a moment. “If it were warmer, we could lure her out with an illusion of food, but she isn’t hungry in the semi-hibernation she’s in right now. Heat and cold in her cave - no, too hot and she’ll just wake up more, and we don’t want that. Too cold and she’ll go torpid.”

  “How about rocks in her bed?” Elspeth hazarded. “Sharp, pointy ones. Maybe combine it with noise.”

  “Good. Good, I like that plan. It should irritate her without making her angry, and if we make her uncomfortable she won’t want to go back in there.” He scratched his head. “Now, which do you want? Rocks or noise?”

  “Rocks,” she said, surprising him. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Since he already had a notion about the noises that might irritate the basilisk, that suited him very well. He had been afraid that Elspeth wouldn’t think herself capable of manifesting good-sized stones, but evidently she already had a solution in mind.

  “Do it, then,” he said, shortly, and concentrated all his attention on a point just behind the basilisk’s body. The one thing he didn‘t want to do was frighten her - just make her leave her lair. If he frightened her, she might be aroused enough to set all her abilities working, and that would do them no good at all.

  Fine thing if I met my end as a late-night snack for afoul-breathed, incredibly stupid monster.