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even retired. Kyrtian would certainly be doing without most of his personal
servants, who would be attendingLord Kyndreth, but that was a small price to
pay for keeping up the deception that this was a normal Elven household.
All that would be in the hands of Gel, Lady Lydiell, and
LordTenebrinth the Seneschal, and the sooner he let the last two know what was
about to descend on them, the better. Gel wasright; Lord Kyndreth's visit
could not be postponed for longwithout offending him.
He paused for a moment to locate both his mother and theSeneschal;
this was no time to waste precious moments huntingfor them by ordinary means.
The merest whisper of magic told him that, as was often the case at this time
of day, Tenebrinth was with his mother in the latter's office, probably going
over the household and estate accounts, making plans for the next couple of
months, or dealing with issues of the servants. Thatcould not possibly have
been better for Kyrtian's purposes. By catching them together, Kyrtian would
only have to go over the prospective visit and the reasons for it once.
Lydiell's office was literally at the center of the manor,
over-looking everything. The manor boasted five towers, one at eachcorner and
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one at the center, with the center-most being a good two stories taller than
the others a full twelve stories tall. The towers gave the manor a look of
delicacy and attenuation thatKyrtian found both attractive and amusingly
deceptive, for thebuilding itself had been constructed to survive a long
siege, and had been built to withstand siege weapons that for the most partno
longer existed. Lydiell's office was a glass-walled room atthe very tip of the
center-most tower, a place that would, in war-
time, be occupied by at least four lookouts. Even in the worst
weather, it was a snug and welcoming place, as the tower wasone of the few
places in the manor that depended on magic for more than lighting and a
decorative illusion or two. Magic, and not mechanical contrivances, heated and
cooled the tower andprotected it from the worst weather. Magic also ensured
thesafety of any occupants of the transparent tube he entered at thebottom of
the tower, powering the little platform under his feet that slowly rose
through the tower to the top. No human could use this contrivance by himself,
not even if that human wasblessed with the humans' own form of magic. In this
way, when she worked, Lydiell could be assured that no one could inter-rupt
her without having to go first to one of elven blood. Therewere drawbacks to
being as approachable as the lords of thismanor had always been; the
short-lived humans tended to come to them with any problem that had them
stymied for more thana few moments, assuming that long experience granted
unfath-omable wisdom.
If it did that, there wouldn 't be a Young Lords' War now. TheOld
Lords would have known better than to let them get as faras they did. And
there wouldn't have been a second Wizard Wareither.
The intervening floors of the tower were, for the most part,
unfurnished, although this was the oldest section of the manorand everything
else had been constructed around it. The round rooms were too small to use for
anything but offices, and onlyLydiell and Tenebrinth had need of an office. So
Kyrtian passed room after round, empty, alabaster-walled room with nothingmore
to entertain him than brief glimpses of the outsidethrough the weapon-slits
that served in place of windows. Even the look of alabaster was deceptive; the
tower was built of something far stronger, though too much magic went into
theconstruction of the material for anyone to use it these days.This tower was
an artifact of the first fifty years after the Elves crossed out of Evelon,
when no one knew if this world would prove to be as dangerous as the one they
had left, a time whenthe elven-born existed as closely crowded together as any
of the
primitive humans in their huts, and waited for something infi-nitely
more dangerous to descend without warning than a mob of weak, short-lived
humans. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]