Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(30)

He stopped and smiled with remembered pleasure. "I thought I was too old for him to call me that way anymore." He blinked and came back to himself. "He told me something in the new temple was summoning these beasts. He couldn't enter the building except through me, and he asked permission to share my body."

Hennea hissed in through her teeth. Seraph tapped the other woman's knee in a demand for silence. The Colossae wizards once had a word for such body sharing - shadowing, they'd called it.

"So you let him accompany you," Seraph said.

Karadoc nodded. "We went into the temple - I'd had the doors boarded up after Volis died, but Ellevanal pulled the boards off." He glanced at his hands, and Seraph saw his nails had been broken past the quick. He saw her look, and said, "It didn't hurt when he did it. He led me through the temple - " He closed his eyes as if he could see it again.

"We went from room to room. Sometimes we would stand in the middle of the room and do nothing - I had the feeling he was listening very hard to something I couldn't hear. We came at last to a room just barely large enough to stand upright in - almost a cupboard. We knelt in the hallway just outside the door. Ellevanal waved my hand over the floor of the little room, and I could see it, too - a scattering of strange shapes that looked almost like writing, except they weren't organized right to left in straight lines as we write. Instead the symbols were organized into odd shapes. Ellevanal put our hands on the shapes and..." Air left his lungs in a wheeze.

"Fire," he said in a low voice. "Ice and fire flowing through my veins like shards of glass."

"By Lark," whispered Hennea. "I wonder that he dared."

Karadoc looked at her.

"He worked magic through a man with no affinity for it," she said. "If you had failed him, it likely would have killed the both of you" - she looked at Seraph pointedly - "god or no god."

"I don't know how long it took," Karadoc said. "It felt like years. But I remember seeing the marks fade from the floor before I fainted. When I awoke, Ellevanal was there beside me."

"In the temple?" Seraph asked. "I thought he couldn't go there."

"He told me we'd cleansed it," said Karadoc. "He picked me up and brought me here to His own temple in the blink of an eye. Frightened my apprentice nearly to death." He smiled a little. "After that, few new creatures came. But the ones already here were bad enough. Something, I don't know what, attacked me here in the temple itself. I would have died if He hadn't saved me. That's when Ellevanal told us to go to your farm where your Traveler magic would help us. We hadn't been there two days when the troll came."

"I don't know much about wizardry" - Seraph turned to Hennea - "but I think I would have noticed such a spell if it were present while we were looking through the temple. That means that the Shadowed was here after we searched the temple the night the false priest died."

Hennea nodded.

"Thank you, Karadoc," Seraph said, getting to her feet.

He laughed. "I'm glad to be helpful." He tipped his head to the temple behind him. "They won't let me clean," he said. "I was feeling old and useless."

"Let them clean," said Seraph. "I have it on the best authority that if it weren't for you, a lot more people would have been killed."

"Whose authority would that be?" he asked.

She smiled at him. "He says you play skiri well."

He paused and looked at her thoughtfully before gifting her with a secretive smile. "Maybe your informant is right."

"So sit and rest," she told him. "Enjoy the fruits of your labors for a day or two more. They'll work you hard enough later. I expect that attendance at Ellevanal's temple is due for an increase."

He laughed. "That may be, daughter. That may be."

"Shadowed," said Hennea, when they'd left Ellevanal's temple behind them.

"Karadoc is not tainted," said Lehr.

"Ellevanal is not of the shadow," agreed Seraph. "He's been Jes's friend for years. But Hennea knows that already."

"What's wrong?" Seraph heard Rinnie ask Jes. "Why is Hennea so upset?"

"Ellevanal shadowed that priest," said Hennea, keeping her gaze firmly on the road before them.

"What?" asked Lehr. "The forest king isn't of the shadow. Jes and I would know."

Seraph sighed. "The Colossae wizards knew how to ride in the heads of others. They called what Ellevanal did with Karadoc welaen. Shadow, the kind of shadow that you see on a sunny day is laen. Welaen then, translates best into Common as 'shadowing.' Its meaning to the Elder Wizards was broader and encompassed a whole range of magical ability. For us, only the touch of the Stalker or the Shadowed brings shadow-tainting." She directed that at Hennea.

"What your Mother means," said Hennea, "is that the Colossae wizards could ride with unsuspecting people or simply take over their bodies without permission - just as the Stalker does. Because of the misuse of welaen, the Colossae wizards forbade it - and there wasn't much that they forbade."

Seraph had forgotten the endless debating about what kind of magic was allowable. It came, she supposed, because the lack of morality among the Colossae wizards had destroyed the city and began the endless guilt-bound wandering of the Travelers. The other Orders just used their abilities as they could, but Ravens must endlessly debate about what was right and proper.