by Jim Grimsley
“Sometime today, we think,” Vella answered, sparing Commyna, who scowled and set about the business of making tea. “She’s not riding as fast as she might. I suppose she’s conserving her strength. There’s no hurry from her point of view.”
“No, I guess there isn’t,” I said. “There’s no one to fight her.”
“One wishes Kentha were still alive.” Vella’s voice was oddly high-pitched. “Or that Kirith Kirin had the ruby ring Drudaen gave her.”
“Never mind dreaming, sister,” Commyna said in her severest tone.
When I had drunk the tea I took leave of them, Vissyn walking me to the spot of shade where Nixva grazed. She said nothing, except that I must try not to dwell on what I knew and must certainly keep the news to myself, hard as that would be. “Pray for the soldiers. Pray for Kirith Kirin.”
“It will be hard simply to pray when I see Julassa in my mind, riding northward to begin her work.”
Vissyn took my face in her hands. “I have no answer for that. Many of your friends will die by her hand, I think, and I’m afraid for Kirith Kirin. If he loses heart —”
We embraced, and I leapt onto Nixva’s back. “I’ll pray.” I kept a careful balance of expression. “I’ll pray for guidance.”
Bending to kiss her brow, I turned Nixva and we rode away.
Chapter 10: FORT GNEMORRA
1
Once Nixva had carried me safely beyond Illyn’s border, we consulted with one another.
The morning was bright and clear, not a cloud in the sky, perfect azure. The air was tinged with a slight chill. We had emerged from the wards round Illyn onto a sheer hillside east of camp in a grove of linvern where sunlight fell as if through lace onto Nixva’s mane. From the height rolled the hillsides and deep vales in which we had set camp; beyond, swimming in haze and gold, the fertile land of West Fenax.
I could not feel the Kyminax sorceress any longer, though when I was in Illyn’s domain I had eyes that could reach her wherever she might be. On Illyn’s shore I had felt her like weight on my mind, but now I was deaf to her singing, blind to her riding.
She would reach Gnemorra today, perhaps soon. So far she had not stirred weather to her call, traveling like a low shadow. Maybe she had set wards so she would know if her riding were being spied on, or maybe she feared no opposition, maybe her singing was as clear as the wind in the leaves above my head. I could not tell. My eyes, my ears, my learned-power was at Illyn. Or rather, was locked within me by a vow. Within the space the mind makes, the kei.
When Julassa reached the fortress, many hundreds would die and our soldiers would be driven from the field.
I breathed deeply, holding my face against Nixva’s neck. “What do you say, friend? Do we go home and pray?”
He tossed his head impatiently. I ran my fingers through his mane. “I can pray here. But what good is praying going to do? I can only tell YY what she knows already. There’s no help unless Yron comes. But what if Yron doesn’t come?”
Nixva pranced from side to side, neighing sharply. I laughed, feeling my stomach lurch at the same time. “I am a power of this world,” I whispered. “Forgive me, Sisters. But how can I obey you when all I can see from obedience is ruin? Forgive me, YY-Mother, if you think what I’m doing is wrong. If Yron won’t come, I’ll go myself.”
I mounted the black horse and turned him toward the Fenax. Swallowing, I began the controlled breathing and insinging that released into my mind the kei of Wyyvisar, Words of Power, the use of which I had always denied myself outside the province of Illyn Water. It was easy, and I was there.
2
I rode through valley and over hill swiftly, skirting camp to the north by a wide margin. Nixva galloped joyously, riding the wave of my silent singing, aware that we were not headed home to the familiar horse-line, snorting his impatience to run even faster.
Once we reached the hinterland of Arthen he headed due west along Wood’s End. Since Arthen was a veil Julassa could not penetrate, I figured to keep hidden that way till I had got my bearings and knew where to find her.
I cleared my mind of every thought, as I had been taught to do, and listened for the sound of distant singing.
Soon I found her. She was riding partly hidden, servants in her company under partial wards, closer than I had guessed from what the lake women had told me, moving partly with aid of the ithikan, a chant that increases motion. She was confident of her strength to bring servants with her, riding at speed in her train; the effort would weaken her in ways I might exploit. Many thoughts could be discerned even from that distance, particularly her baleful hatred of the countryside and her sense of foreboding that came from the nearness of Arthen.
Her servants were not men. I could get no sense of what creatures they were but I guessed them to be Verm.
My heart sank at the realization of her preparedness for what was to come. She had been laying the foundations of power in herself for more years than I could number. I was a babe compared to that.
Grimly I turned to my own preparations. I prayed, YY grant me guidance and teach me to sing.
Soon Nixva and I could no longer remain under the protective cover of Arthen, and from there we would ride in danger unless I could hide us. This I had been preparing for, and from the moment we trod the Fenax the rhythm of my song was subtle, masked to seem like wind or running water, so that even the Sisters would have trouble finding me. To hide me from Julassa, who anticipated no enemy, I deemed this sufficient.
I no more knew the road to Gnemorra than I knew the way back to my father’s farm without a guide, but I did not need to know it. I was behind Julassa, whose presence was already moving steadily northward, and I had only to follow her. Her speed was great but mine was greater, I saw to that. I could make the ithikan, too. Hugging Nixva, my body under various controls, I hovered in the dual trance, my spirit flung out above my body so that I had long vision, like that of a bird flying high above; my spirit in the small space inside the body, singing. I traveled like a shadow. Twice I flashed through farmyards unseen, leaving no more trace than strong wind leaves, bending the wheat to the ground and howling on. Nixva galloped savagely, mane whipping like black fire, fearless of the magic that immersed him.
We were long past noon by now. Time moved too quickly for me, who had much to prepare.
Ahead of us, in my elongated vision, the sky was changing before my eyes.
One who has not seen power move can hardly imagine the sight, the sudden boiling of clouds out of nothing, the spreading of a shadow over the land sudden as the sweeping of a hand across the sun. Julassa Kyminax increased her song suddenly, her power swelled, engulfed earth and sky, so that in the space of moments darkness spread from horizon to horizon. She was drinking the light into herself, for strength.
Her shadow fell as far north as Umilaven and as far south as Nevyssan and the Prince’s encampment. Kirith Kirin, emerging from his field tent to receive messengers, saw the shadow and knew his enemy had come.
I hid from this, letting shadow mingle with my own singing, though this was taxing. I had thus less space in the kei for my other preparations. Meanwhile she was beginning to lay out her own applications, staking claim over a good deal of ground and beginning a song to move power at a deep level. She was still unaware of me; what she was preparing was for our army.
She used words I did not know, and I assumed this was the Ildaruen in which Drudaen instructed those who served or followed him. But the lake women had taught me other means of surmising thought, and I read her pattern from a distance, and understood at once that I should challenge it.
She was summoning a storm, gathering rain and lightning in the clouds and calling a bitter wind from the mountains.
For a moment I hesitated, even after I knew what I had to do.
After the first Word there would be no turning back. She would know me then, and she would not relent until she brought me down.
But by now our speed had swept us onto the str
etch of plain before Fort Gnemorra, and I saw the hastily-lit watchfires of those who waited there, feeling the fear that had overtaken them with the coming of the Witch’s shadow. These were my friends. They could smell their death.
She sang out for fire and light, and a broad, blood-red illumination surrounded her, lighting her hellish ride across the plain
With a jolt I realized I was so close to her I could see her with the eyes of my body. She had been careless, and she did not yet know it. She had let me come too close.
I rose up straight on Nixva’s back and called out in Words for light and fire of my own, and my Words were true. The thrill of it ran through me, that this was the world beyond Illyn and I was in it with my whole self, including the magic I knew, and I exulted as confusion rose flooded my adversary. She heard the voice of an enemy where she had thought to find none. Moreover, she heard Wyyvisar, and she knew herself opposed. She was dismayed in spite of herself.
While her thought faltered I bore down on her, both in speed and in power, so that Nixva swept across the plain at the same time I sang out against her storm and reached forward to hold the heart of her horses . The horses cried out at my deep touch, and Julassa failed to counter me in time to save them all. One of the horses died and his rider was thrown headlong. Julassa gathered her wits about her well enough to mount a defense that prevented me from coming so close again, but she was shaken.
Nixva swept by the dead horse and the stunned rider, some creature like nothing I had ever seen before, bigger than any man or woman, rising from a tumble that would have killed most mortals. I felt a fetidness from him and called out savage Words that sent pain through all his limbs and bound him, casting him to the ground, helpless. His cries were real. The sorceress had left him unprotected.
She struck next, working from the fifth level and within her body, hurling power back toward me and forward toward the army surrounding Genfynnel. This was a mistake, for her thrust toward me was absorbed in my defenses while her assault on the soldiers was insufficient for the distance. But she was still closer to them than I, and I feared when she was close enough to use killing phrases, many would die. I increased my efforts to reach her, forgetting, for the moment, any thought of attack.
Nixva responded as he always did, and our speed was as great as any we had ever achieved under the watchful eyes of our tutors. Julassa did not turn in her saddle but I could feel her awareness, and I drew close enough I could make out her hand clutching the white hood to her flame-colored hair.
One could hear the soldiers shouting terror beneath the walls. Not one man flinched, not one woman stepped aside, when the Witch finally reached the line of drawn swords and bows. The shrieking of her voice was terrible, as was the carnage she wreaked. I reached forward to challenge her and her body stiffened in the saddle.
I was no longer aware of thought or of the words that were pouring out of me, a sound of eerie singing from my living voice, the unearthly echo of Words in the kei space. I was bent on the witch whose every move I must understand, whose every thought I must anticipate. She kept to her horse with difficulty. I took the chance, and dismounted from Nixva.
From the ground, without the need to spare much thought for balance or for Nixva’s safety, I could focus more attention on my work. We were surrounded by onlookers, which I did not like, but I could not let my attention waver for a moment to warn them away. I need not have worried. In the moments that followed, fear cleared us a broad circle.
I began setting wards about her, and naming Bans to bind her. Twice she broke my song contemptuously, but not with enough authority to free herself from my binding. The third time she fought furiously, but in the end I would have had her, except she did the movement into spin and hurled herself some distance away, her horse trembling with the effort. A wave of heat and light like fire swept over me, and soldiers drew back, at the moment that her second Verm companion, whom she had left to defend himself, dismounted among the foot soldiers. Other, dimly-heard sounds penetrated my consciousness, and I vaguely realized the soldiers from inside the fort were attacking as well, the sky raining down arrows and stones from catapults.
Had I ever seen a battlefield before, that moment might not have rattled me as it did, but that brief confusion nearly cost me the fight I was waging, and my life in the bargain. My thought wavered from Julassa and she redoubled her attack, so that I felt her touch in my body and could hear the incantations she was intoning as she set up her wards around me.
She was nearly cackling, and both relief and greed radiated from her when she thought she had me beaten. She meant to drink my life as she had drunk the lives of many local powers who had opposed her over the generations she had lived. But I had not risked the Sisters’ anger to get beaten like some minor dabbler, some parlor-magician. I broke down her wards one by one.
She reached for gems to amplify her singing, and for a time I felt myself sorely pressed again. She was able to break the storm over us, and it was a powerful storm, but her control of its elements was not as close as she wished, and I was able to direct its main fury away from the plain on which the army was fighting. She ensnared soldiers who strayed too close to her and killed them, and for a while this fed her power, until someone grew wise enough to order the soldiers to stand away. I felt this happen and was relieved.
She settled down to a long fight. I could read the thought when it occurred to her, that what she could not defeat quickly she could wear down by turns. Force gathered in her, and she began her extended attack.
Time has an indescribable role in such a contest. She tested me on every level, probing each of my defenses while she launched attacks whose countermeasures cost me strength. Had there been any chink in my armor she would have found it, but there was none. I was in the dual state and far above us both, the present moment stretched as long as practical, and I understood that she had not begun this meditation and that she could never beat me from within the body. The realization came to me at the same that it came to her, at the end of a long sequence of application-and-countermeasure in which she tried a few tricks so simple I broke them with scorn. She must have heard the harmony of the dual state, which is unmistakable. She had begun her own fifth-level defenses late, and I could read her thought. She launched a fifth level attack so skillful it left me dizzy, but I was proof against it. Hardest to fight were those incantations she broadcast through hand-held gems, but in those moments I found a strange ally in the gems themselves, especially from my eye in the air. The Sisters had told me I had a gift for gem-magic, scarce praise, and on that battlefield before Gnemorra, when the witch employed these jewels as devices, I felt the power she was moving and understood it.
My hesitance to launch any assault on her she read as weakness, even when my defenses were deft. She set wards around me again but I broke them down — this time, noting her stance, her look of confidence, I was careful to break them with apparent difficulty, one by one, and to seem to struggle as I did so. She noted this. Soon after she set out on a dance of encirclement.
During this dance, wards of confinement are fixed into place one at a time by a movement of the physical body so they can no longer be broken easily. If she completed the round I would no longer have freedom to move beyond the ward circle, and from there it would simply be a matter of time before she ate my soul. If I fled from the field, as I could, to save myself, she would go on with her slaughter of Kirith Kirin’s army. But to stop her from setting the wards I would have to break her in the midst of her dance. She was doing me some honor at least. The encirclement dance is one of the high magics and, since earliest times, magicians have used it to test one another.
She moved quickly and surely in the dance, into and out of spin, light and fire flashing round her, the storm raging overhead and wind howling across the plain. I watched her figure calmly, her smooth limbs and sinuous arms, bracelets shivering up and down, gems flashing. Her voice was eerie, echoing in me, and beyond it, behind it, the shadow of anoth
er voice with whom she was communicating.
I knew who this would be.
I sang against that distant song most powerfully, my voice in the air and in the plane of the fifth circle where I knew to find him; I sang Yron has come, oh you lord of shadow, and I could feel his distant confusion. Uncertain who or what I might be, he hesitated. When the link between those two was weakened I could feel the jolt in Julassa Kyminax, the faltering of dance and thought. Moving quickly toward her, I broke the ward she had been setting and drove her back with fire and other applications. But the wards she had already set remained fixed and she took refuge behind them.
She was holding gems in her hands.
She tossed them in her loose fingers, looking above at the sky as if listening.
Now, in trance and out of my body, I expanded time and moved to the gems. A way to do so became clear to me, to move directly through a space I had never seen and to move in the kei, nowhere else, which is not motion at all, but which makes the world, as Commyna said. Ignoring her wards, I sang to her gems in a way I had never tried before, behind the Ildaruen that filled the stone, not even contesting its presence, simply refilling the gems with Wyyvisar and reaching from them to Julassa.