hooking tent bags onto the wall near Val’s pillow.
‘Be there a want upon you to eat dinner now, Wise Ones?’ she said.
‘Not now, but soon,’ Valandario said. ‘My thanks, but I’ll call you when we’re ready.’
With a curtsey Sidro hurried out to leave them their privacy. Dallandra made a golden dweomer light and tossed it up to the tent roof, then sat down on a cushion opposite Valandario with the scrying cloth between them.
‘The thing is,’ Dallandra said, ‘no one’s been able to see the beastly island in any sort of vision. It may be impossible, because after all, it has to be surrounded by water, since it’s an island. But I keep wondering if there might be some way to reach it somehow.’
Val nodded, then assembled a handful of gems, picking and choosing from various pouches.
‘We wish to know about Haen Marn,’ Val said. ‘How may we see it for ourselves?’ She scattered the gems over her scrying cloth. For some while she studied the layout, whispering a word or two at moments. ‘Ah,’ she said at last, ‘something needs completing, something unfinished lingers in the question.’
‘Well, we rather knew that,’ Dallandra said.
Val frowned, then laid a finger on a topaz ovoid that lay on the seam between a red square and a black.
‘No, no, not just the question itself,’ Val said. ‘It’s some small thing, a step towards finding the answer.’
Dallandra reminded herself to hold her tongue and let her colleague do things her own way. Finally Val pointed out a gold bead that gleamed against a misty lavender square in one corner of the patchwork.
‘Treasure in the past,’ Val announced. ‘Or from the past.’ She raised her head and looked off into space, her mouth slack, her eyes expressionless as she waited for some thought or omen to rise into her mind. ‘The scroll.’ She smiled, herself again. ‘Dalla, Aderyn had a scroll that Evandar left for him. It was a set of evocations in the strangest language I’ve ever heard or seen. Do you know what happened to it?’
‘It’s in my tent,’ Dallandra said. ‘Gavantar gave it to me before he set sail for the Southern Isles. Aderyn had wanted me to have it, he said.’
‘Splendid! I had the privilege of working with the thing with Aderyn and Nevyn when I was just out of my apprenticeship. Evandar made sure that it was found at the same time as the obsidian pyramid. They didn’t seem to be connected back then, but he might have had some reason to leave them together.’
‘Evandar always had a reason.’ Dallandra got to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch it right now.’
The men of the alar had finished raising Dallandra’s tent. She ducked inside and found Neb arranging her bedding and goods. ‘Have you seen the grey tent bag with the symbols of Aethyr on it?’ Dallandra said. ‘They’re embroidered with purple yarn.’
‘I have indeed.’ Neb unpiled a few things, rummaged around in a heap of bags, and at last brought out the correct one. ‘Here we are. Why do you want it?’
‘It doesn’t concern you.’
He winced but said nothing more.
As she walked back to Valandario’s tent, Dallandra was thinking more about Neb than the scroll. He was not exactly disrespectful around her, his master in dweomer, but still, at moments his behaviour was a little too free and familiar, as if he’d known her for a long time. In a way, he had, of course, in his previous life, when as a young woman she’d been very much his inferior in dweomer workings. That was a long time ago, she reminded herself. I’d better make that clear to him. At these moments she was grateful to Grallezar all over again, for warning her about his wish that he was Nevyn still.
Inside her tent, Val had put away her scrying gems and cloth. Dallandra knelt under the dweomer light and brought out the wooden box holding the scroll. She laid the bag down, sketched out a circle of warding around it, then opened the box and brought out the scroll. The pabrus had turned brown over the years, and it threatened to split along the creases where it had been first rolled, then squashed into a box. Very carefully indeed she unrolled it and laid it down on the tent bag.
‘I should have left this in Mandra with Grallezar’s books,’ Dallandra said. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten I had it.’
‘It’s just as well you did,’ Val said, smiling. ‘Since we need it.’
They leaned closer, nearly head to head, to look it over.
‘As I remember,’ Valandario said, ‘there’s one invocation that’s incomplete. That may be what the scrying meant. So let’s start there. Ah, here it is!’
Valandario cleared her throat, then read the call aloud in a deliberately colourless voice. ‘Olduh umd nonci do a dooain de Iaida, O gah de poamal ca a nothoa ah avabh. Acare, ca, od zamran, lap ol zirdo noco olpirt de olpirt.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ Dallandra said.
‘Oh yes. Although –’ Valandario frowned at the scroll. ‘Master Aderyn read these out in an odd way. He sounded every letter as the syllable it represents. Ol-de oo-me-deh deh-oh – like that.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense that way, either.’
‘It’s not in Elvish, that’s why. There’s a translation of everything down at the bottom –’
Dallandra looked where Val was pointing. ‘Right! Here it is!’ Dallandra read from the scroll. ‘I do call you in the name of the Highest, oh spirit of the palace on the in the midst of hyancith seas. Come, therefore, and show yourself to me for I serve the same Light of Lights.’
‘I’d say that the missing word has to come right here, “palace on the in the midst of hyacinth seas”.’ Valandario laid a delicate finger on the fragile scroll. ‘The palace on what? Could it be an island?’
‘It certainly could, and look! right here in the gloss, it says: “some say that the spirit word for island is hanmara”.’ Dallandra nearly choked on the name. ‘Hanmara,’ she repeated. ‘But Rori told me once that haen marn means black stone in the Dwarvish tongue.’
‘Oh, does it?’ Valandario broke into a grin. ‘Well, why can’t hanmara mean both? The island might appear to be made of black stone if we saw it on the spirit plane.’
‘Yes, that’s plausible.’
‘The palace on the black stone in the midst of hyacinth seas. I like the way that echoes in my mind.’
‘One of us needs to vibrate this call.’
‘I don’t want you to risk the child.’
The generosity of this simple statement – considering who that child had been in her previous life – left Dallandra speechless. Valandario misunderstood the silence.
‘Something nasty might answer, you know,’ Val said. ‘Aderyn was very careful about that, when he first had the scroll. So it had best be me.’
‘You’re probably right, but I’m going to come along when you do
