The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,131

to take the dirty little bolus of wax, blood, sticks, and feathers that the wizard held out to her in his sticky hands. “But truly, even if I hadn’t come here, trouble would come upon you. The men who hate magic are moving—the men who seek to remove magic from the world, so that no one may challenge their power or see their doings and expose them for the lies they are.”

“But I—I’m not one of the great ones, you know,” the mage had whispered. “I stay out of the way—I don’t make trouble—the Lord of Erralswan has never...”

“The Lord of Erralswan has never thought of you one way or the other,” Tally said sadly. “And now people are making him think. If you can use a scrying crystal to see the movements of armies—if you can cast a spell of darkness, confusion, or illness against an enemy’s troops—if you have the slightest ability to read the winds or the signs of the bones that would tell of treachery and ambush—people will make the Lord of Erralswan think that you are his enemy, you are a traitor, you are not deserving of even a hearing because you are who and what you are. It needs no magic to cast an illusion like that.”

The man had only looked at her, holding his big gray cat in his arms, his eyes stupid with fear and the hope that she wasn’t right.

Tally looped the amulet’s cord about her neck and slipped the blob of gritty wax into her jacket. “Flee, if you can,” she said, her voice quiet and her eyes holding his. “The Lady of the Drowned Lands is garnering mages on her islands; you will be safe there. She needs the help of everyone who can do magic, everyone who was born with that seed in his blood...”

“Is that where you are going?”

She hesitated, but knew the man would guess it; then nodded.

He’d swallowed hard, his thin fingers, pierced through with bits of twine and string for the small blood-sacrifices of his system of power, stroking the soft, thick fur of his cat’s head while the animal rubbed its cheek against the tattered black sleeve. “I—I’ve lived here all my life,” he’d said uncertainly. “The people here know me...”

But as Tally turned to go he’d stepped quickly forward, to touch her sleeve.

“That amulet...” he said. “It won’t... My power, the power of my blood, of my familiar spirits, isn’t—isn’t great. The amulet will keep you cloaked from the eyes of your foes, only as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself. If they know you’re there, if they’ve noticed you, or are looking for you, it won’t help you. You must keep still.”

You must keep still.

Rhion had said something of the kind to her, also, when he’d given her similar talismans to keep the neighbors from seeing her, all that long summer she’d first known him, when he and Jaldis had been living in the Lower Town. But listening to the jingle of harness, the strike of hooves, clear and sharp now in the stony pass behind her, she knew that if these riders had visited the Hand-Pricker in Yekkan and had forced from him that the woman they sought was going disguised as a man, the amulet would do her no good.

Even as the scene had returned to her—whole and complete in seconds—she had been scanning the pass, seeking cover in the rocks, looking for anything, a stand of trees, a boulder large enough to conceal a woman and two horses...

But there was nothing, only a few scrubby knots of mountain laurel halfway up the gray-yellow shale of the cliffs, a low-growing tangle of heather among the rocks...

Her gloved hands, aching from the unaccustomed work of making and striking camp, of caring for the horses, and loading the packs, felt cold on the reins. She must either sit in full sight of the riders when they came into view and pray that the Hand-Pricker hadn’t told them who to look for... or flee.

If she fled they would certainly see her. And she wasn’t at all sure she could outrun riders in the rocky tangle of the pass.

Panic pounded at her, flapping like a bird against the cage of her ribs. Every second lost made it increasingly unlikely she could escape if she bolted.

It would be a long way down the damp gray forests of the north side of the mountains, misty country among the clouds, and then the rainy