Cashel laughed and withdrew his hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s nothing here except what we see, and that won’t help us.”
“But what was it?” the girl said, a trifle sharply.
“Just a tree,” Cashel said. “That tree.”
He pointed upward. Branches like the stems of ancient wisteria twisted out of the image at about the height Cashel could reach by raising his staff. At the ends were sprays like the whips of a weeping willow, though much shorter.
“Tell him,” Mounix whispered.
“You tell him!” Hook snapped back. “I’m all right.”
Cashel turned. Tilphosa turned with him but moved a little back. “Tell me what?” he said. His voice was a growl, almost angry; he wasn’t pleased to be reminded of the sailors’ presence.
“Master,” Hook said after a quick glance at Mounix. “The captain wants me to say that Ousseau’s pretty well done in. He really means he wants to stop, is what I think.”
Cashel looked at them. Ousseau’s eyes were open; so was his mouth. There was as much intelligence in the one as the other. Mounix forced a smile that looked like he was dying of lockjaw; Hook tried to lean on the sword he’d taken from the captain and fell sideways when it slid into the soft ground. He barely caught himself.
As for Tilphosa—
“How are you feeling?” Cashel asked, turning to the girl. “Do you want to go on?”
“Yes,” she said, though she seemed to be trembling. “We can…Maybe a little farther. I’d like to get out of these woods if we could.”
Cashel sucked in his lower lip as he thought. “We’ll go to the next of these lights,” he said after a moment. “The one up there.”
He nodded in the direction they’d been heading. “Then we’ll bed down if we don’t see something better close by. All right?”
“Of course it’s all right,” Tilphosa said, glaring at the desperate sailors. She touched his arm. “Let’s go, Cashel.”
Cashel smiled as they trudged on. This one wasn’t a girl to get on the wrong side of. He was used to that, of course, since you could say the same thing about his sister Ilna. Despite her being a lady and all, Tilphosa made Cashel feel pretty much at home.
“Cashel?” the girl said. “Are the lights a kind of window that you created when you broke down the barrier around us in the temple?”
Cashel shrugged. He didn’t like that sort of question. It was partly that he didn’t know the answer, and partly that he was afraid the answer was yes. Like he’d told Tilphosa, he’d always been careful with the strength of his arms because he knew the damage he’d do otherwise. If he was doing things that he didn’t know about, then Duzi alone knew the harm he might cause.
“I don’t know, mistress,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, but I don’t know.”
As they got closer to the pale blur. Alone of the images he’d seen since they came to this place, this was in a real clearing. It hung in the air, in the middle of six straight-trunked trees whose branches wove a kind of arbor overhead.
Cashel hadn’t felt anything around the other images. No reason he should, of course, since he’d found that they were only there to his eyes, or maybe to his mind’s eye; but this one—
This one didn’t frighten Cashel; but he guessed the feeling he got would have frightened a lot of other people.
Tilphosa looked around with a set expression, then picked up a fallen branch and raised it as a club. The wood had rotted to punk, but it seemed to make her feel better to hold something she could at least pretend was a weapon. She must feel something here too.
There was only blackness inside the ball of light. Cashel squinted, then twisted his head to one side and the other, waiting for the image to appear.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“It’s dark wherever it is,” Tilphosa said. Her voice had a studied firmness. “Whatever it is. But it’s there. It’s watching us, Cashel.”
“Yeah, I think it is,” he said.
He turned. The sailors had stopped some distance back; they were watching him.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re not going to stay here after all.”
They resumed walking. “Do you think the sky ahead is getting lighter, Cashel?” the girl asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll know before long.”
Cashel felt the eyes on him long after the blur had vanished from sight behind them.
“Can’t we have a fire?” asked Metron, shivering on bucket upturned in the middle of the stable floor. He wore an ostler’s tunic, filthy but dry, while water pooled beneath the stall door from which his own robe of silk brocade hung. “It’s not just the cold water, you see. I shut my whole body down when I sent my soul out of it.”
Garric smiled. Several of the bandits went grim-faced at the mention of wizardry, but others laughed outright at the absurdity of what they’d just heard.
“Can we have a fire in a barn full of straw?” Vascay mused aloud. “No, we can’t. Anyhow, with all the horses in here you’d warm up quick enough even if it were cold out. Which it’s not.”
He coughed to clear his throat. Garric, sitting beside Vascay, glanced at him to judge his expression.
Vascay’s face gave nothing away. He opened and closed his left fist; at each movement, the sapphire ring appeared on or disappeared from his little finger. He didn’t speak.
“That’s the ring I sent you for, isn’t it?” said Metron. He’d obviously been taken aback by Vascay’s attitude but decided to deal with it by bluster. He held out his hand. “Well done. Now we have to release Thalemos before we can topple the Intercessor.”
Tint lay in the straw at Garric’s feet, watching Metron intently. At first Garric thought the tremble of her rib cage against his ankle was purring, but after a moment he realized it was an inaudible growl.
“We’ll listen to your proposal, wizard,” Vascay said nonchalantly. “But right at the moment, I’d say what my Brethren and I have to do is get out of this district by dawn…and Thalemos, I’d say, could take care of himself.”
“I’ve been saying that!” Ademos said loudly. “This whole business was a bad idea from the first. We’re lucky we didn’t all die on Serpents’ Isle instead of just Kelbat and Ceto, and now that the Intercessor knows what’s going on, well!”
Other men openly agreed with him. From the expressions around the circle, Garric thought more would’ve called, “Right!” and “The quicker, the better,” if they hadn’t disliked Ademos too much to willingly identify themselves with his position.
The wizard nodded to the Brethren, his expression bland. If the situation were what Vascay baldly stated, the gang would be gone already and Metron would still be on the bottom of the pond. Vascay was using the legitimate threat to restructure the relationship between him and Metron. If Metron called his bluff…
Except that Garric wasn’t sure Vascay was bluffing; and if Garric wasn’t sure, then Metron would be a fool to take the risk.
Metron wasn’t a fool. He spread his hands, and said, “I’m sorry, Master Vascay, I got ahead of myself. This isn’t the catastrophe it must seem to your good selves, arriving as you have on the tail of the Intercessor’s troops. Echeon is flailing about, but he can’t overcome foreordained fate.”
“Is fate going to keep the Intercessor’s knife from cutting Lord Thalemos’ throat?” Vascay said bluntly. “Why won’t he do that, Metron?”
“If Echeon kills Thalemos,” the wizard said, leaning forward to seem more earnest, “then the real Thalemos will appear somewhere else. Echeon has seen the future, or at least a portion of it. He knows that Lord Thalemos becomes Earl of Laut, so his only hope is to bend him to his will first. When we rescue Thalemos, we’ll be able to proceed with the plan.”
“Seems to me,” Hame said slowly, “that if it’s as simple as that, we all oughta go back east where we come from and wait for the happy day. Eh?”