Tramd held his breath, aware of the eye, not daring to take his attention from the cracks in the baked blood. The cracks closed, a little at a time, healing, but were he to look away, even for an instant-such things would flow out as would chill the hearts of dragons and strike such fear into the souls of mortals that they would run mad. The eye glowed, went dark, then glowed again. The cracks in the blood healed, slowly.
On the wall the shadows took one shape, that of a hound with squinting eyes and jaws agape. The hound's howling wound through the soul of the mage, a long, eerie wail like the cry of a wolf separate from his pack. Fire sighed, and the black blood-runes closed their wounds, shutting out darkness. Tramd sat back on his heels, looking up at the red wall, the shadow-hound seeming to breathe as the red silk moved to a vagrant breeze off the tors.
"Hound," said the mage, his eyes on the eye, his will chaining the beast even as the beast heard his voice. "Hound, will you hunt?" The glaring eye blinked, light, no light, light again. The hound would hunt. "Go down into the forest," Tramd commanded. "Go out and search, and come back to tell me what magic you find, book or artifact, scroll or ring or pendant. Go, and then come again."
The shadow-hound slid from the wall, a waking thing, though not a living thing. Through the night it ran, a child of darkness passing through darkness as fishes do the sea. Down into the forest, beneath the light of the three-quarter moons it ran into the burned lands, the place of charred trunks and ash where now and again embers winked, eyes in the ruin watching the shadow-hound run. In villages it ran, and when it passed by houses where people slept, it passed as a nightmare, a chilling of sleep, a groaning. When it passed through ruin, it ran faster, for nothing remained to find there. Some things of magic it discovered, for this was a kingdom where mages were honored. The hound sensed rings of power, swords whose blades had struck down ogres, whose gemmed hilts wore runes of strength to turn back curses. It found these things in the little towns between the burned borderlands and the straight-running King's Road. Swift as a cold wind out of winter, the hound passed the encampment of a horde of elves, ragged folk, bleeding folk, old women and men and little children who sobbed themselves to sleep. Sleepers woke wailing when the hound slipped round the light of their fires and ran swiftly on.
Beneath the eyes of Solinari and Lunitari and the eye no one saw but some felt, Nuitari's dark moon, the beast of magic ran. It passed the perimeters of many camps of Wildrunners, and some magic it found there. This it did not bother to reckon. Its master would pick the bones of these dead when they fell in battle. One more thing of magic it found, some books enspelled by wards. Three were slender, nothing strongly shining. A fourth, thick and old, was a thing worth noting. The hound discovered these in a cave not far from the city of the elf-king, fair Silvanost, the shining jewel upon the breast of the kingdom.
Satisfied at last, the shadow-hound returned to the tent of its master. All the things that the shadow-hound had discovered and reckoned gained it better than praise from its master.
"For the count of twenty," said Tramd to the fire-eyed darkness, "you may run among the sleeping, out there in the army. Take what you will and do with it as you please."
The hound slipped out from under the tent, red eyes gleaming like embers after a burning. Curious, Tramd stepped outside the tent. In the cool night he watched the shadow run, rippling over the ground, formless now. The cold light of stars shone down. The moons had set. Like red eyes in the night, the army's myriad campfires glowed. He watched the hound course, the shadow running, and he felt his blood stir, the blood of the avatar, the blood of the ruined heap of flesh and bone lying far away in a bed of silks and satin. The hound leaped-he felt it!-and it tore something from a sleeping warrior. Not something to bleed, not something to break. It tore out the soul of the luckless one and four others besides.
Tramd smiled. He sighed and felt the shadow-hound fill up with the essence of its victims, their every thought and wish and dream, each fear, each weakness, the sum of their spirits. He laughed, a low and terrible sound like stones grinding together, as the beast took those souls and dragged them back to the darkness from whence it came.
He watched as the un-souled ran wailing among the army, screaming. He saw them caught, saw them killed, and he heard the ones who did the killing say to each other, "Madness. Just as well they're dead." After all, these were ogres, and sometimes those went mad and had to be killed. In the place where the hound dwelt, though, the wailing and screaming never ended.
In the morning, Tramd noted all the things of magic the shadow-hound had located, reckoned where they were and marked them upon the map he kept in a small silver coffer. He had done this in each land the Highlord's army swept through, a treasure hunter hunting. As he had in Goodlund, in Nordmaar, in Balifor, he would visit all these places once the people had been brought to heel and Phair Caron's governments were set up. He would take these treasures and test them. While he wondered if one of the things found here would be the treasure he had so long quested for, Tramd ate some breakfast, then went out for a walk in the new day. His wondering done for the time, he went to tell his Highlord that a great army of elves was on the move. "And the refugees we sent running into the forest are now only a short journey from Silvanost. They're hungry and ragged and ready to eat the autumn harvest and still look for more from the winter stores.
"My lady," he said as she looked up from her breakfast of wine and cheese, "the beginning of the end of the elves is here."
Chapter 6
In the dawn of the day, with the sky turning to rosy lavender and the late night mists rising from the little lily ponds in the Garden of Astarin, Alhana Starbreeze went through the Tower of the Stars, through high chambers and low, in search of her father. She went in silence, as was her way. Her soft leather slippers made no sound upon the marble floors. The hem of her azure damasked gown did not whisper against her ankles. She wore upon her arms the golden bracelets her father had given to her mother upon the day of her birth, nine circlets, each shaped like twining vines. These did not ring one against another as she went, for she walked with her hands clasped before her, tightly held so that her knuckles shone white where bone pressed against flesh.
She went from room to room. In his empty bedchamber a green tunic lay upon the bed, embroidered in silver runes. Beside lay hose of softest brushed wool. At the foot of the bed on the cool marble floor stood Lorac's slippers, golden leather tanned to buttery softness. A small coffer of mahogany chased with silver sat unopened beside the tunic. In it, she knew, lay the Speaker's jewels, necklaces, pendants, circlets to hold his hair from his brow-all made by the most skilled dwarf smiths in the days when there had been commerce between Silvanesti and Thorbardin. That was a long time ago. Now the dwarves kept themselves apart from the world in their mountain fastness, and the Silvanesti elves stayed always within the confines of the Barrier Hedge. The only thing they had in common was their need to keep themselves removed from the rest of the world and a stubborn disdain for outlanders.
Alhana did not find her father in the library or the music room. She hastened to the solarium, but he was not there. Neither was he in the arboretum, though she had hoped to find him there, enjoying the rising light in those sweet sunny rooms where flowers grew in riotous profusion. She went out onto the gallery where it rounded the well of the audience chamber, and her heart sank.