“Take them now,” he said to the group with the children, speaking in Luap’s voice, “At once, with what you can carry. You know where.” He hoped they did. He hoped the legend Paks had heard of survivors riding in from the west to Fin Panir was true. That group, the larger, moved out of the great chamber. At the far end, he saw a dais where Paks had reported a transfer pattern—but it had been blocked. Why had the Elders not let the innocents leave?
He put that aside for the moment, focusing once more on Luap, that shell of a prince. Luap stared at him, still expressing nothing but fear and pleading.
Let me. Gird again.
Kieri dared not glance aside, but in his mind he argued: Wait. One more command.
The pressure eased. Once more he seized Luap and through him gave more orders. Slowly the group of armed men and women arranged themselves on one side of the chamber, row on row, still talking, a few looking back at Luap. They knelt, and he pressed with all he knew of his magery, feeling Paks and Gird doing the same. Sleep. Rest. Wake later at need. Slowly now, the heads all turned to face the dais. Silence grew. No more fidgeting, no more movement at all: they knelt motionless, silent, in their formation.
Luap alone remained upright, the look on his face something Kieri did not want to see or remember, though he knew he would not forget it. Grief, fear, pleading … If he had been a child, Kieri would have gathered him up, hugged him—but this was a man, or what should have been a man. “It wasn’t all my fault,” Luap said, heart to heart. Kieri’s sympathy vanished in a wave of contempt.
Now. Let me.
Gladly. Gladly he would let anyone else deal with that thing he could not call a man. He still gave power to the link but let Gird and Paks—or Gird through Paks—do what they would with Luap. The man’s shape enlarged and faded until it was a huge misty figure that then rose through the air—and as it passed into the rock, all at once Kieri saw the outside of the place and that shape wavering on a fin of rock sticking out from a big red block of it. So alien was the place compared with anything he’d seen that he could hardly take it in.
Took me that way, too.
Gird. When had he been there in life?
Tell him to stand guard. You are a king; it will mean something to him.
The wraith or phantom bothered him less than the human man had; Kieri gave his orders crisply, precisely, and the wraith bowed, then stood upright again. For a moment more his awareness held the place—he was seeing what had been, tiny planted fields in the canyon, now trampled and blighted by iynisin as they neared the block of rock on which the wraith stood. And far down the canyon—had it really been that long?—the cluster of refugees, hurrying along a thread of trail.
Then it was all gone; he was falling, falling, and hit the floor of his study, its familiarity like a blow, like waking from a nightmare.
He lay a moment, gathering his wits, and looked over to see Paks also lying still, eyes closed. Then, as he watched, her eyes opened. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“I could ask the same question,” he said. The fall had been but a jolt; the whole experience still roiled his mind.
“Kieri!” Arian’s voice. “What happened? I felt—”
He pushed himself up to sitting; his head swam. He felt as exhausted as if he’d gone three nights without sleep. Arian, still in her dressing gown, stared at him, then looked at Paks.
“Did you try—?” she began, her tone accusing.
“We did … something,” Kieri said. “At least, now we know who put them to sleep. At least we think we did that.”
“We did,” Paks said. “Gird was there,” she said to Arian.
“I thought you were going to wait until I could help,” Arian said in a tone so like a mother to an errant child that Kieri could not help grinning.
“You were sleeping soundly,” he said. “The babes were quiet for once. All we hoped to do was have Paks show me what the place looked like now so I could focus on it later. I thought, if it worked, it would be such a small magery it would not bother you or the babes. But some power—”
“Gird,” Paks said.
“—sent us earlier, in Luap’s own time, when the iynisin attacked and the Elders closed the transfer pattern there, trapping the magelords. There was nothing to do but figure out how to put them—some of them—into enchanted sleep.”
“So I wake thinking you’re under attack and falling? That’s better?” She shook her head at them. “You look half dead, the pair of you. I’ll get food and drink; don’t bother to get up.”
Kieri wasn’t sure he could get up; even sitting, he felt unsteady. He lay down again.