The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “In these times, Defalk could not have a better ruler.”

  “You’re so careful, Jecks, but I understand. Thank you.” She took the water bottle and drank, then handed it back.

  The players stood on the cleared part of the ridge, stretching, coughing, clearing throats. The sounds of strings and the clarinet-like woodwind and the deeper falk-horn intertwined as the group finished its warm-up tunes.

  “Your players stand ready, Lady Anna,” Liende said.

  “Thank you, Liende. I’m almost ready.” Anna walked to where Hanfor waited, still mounted. “I don’t know what will happen, but it could spook the mounts.”

  “I have told the men that. They understand.”

  “Good.” She paused. “Thank you.”

  Hanfor touched his brow in an informal salute. “May the harmonies be with you, Lady Anna.”

  Anna glanced from Hanfor to Jecks, getting a brief smile from the white-haired lord. She took a last swallow and coughed gently to make sure her throat was clear. Finally, she nodded to Liende.

  “The battle tune. On my mark. . . . Mark!” The head player gestured, and lifted her clarinet-like horn, turning to join in the melody she had started.

  Anna tried to stay focused and relaxed, letting her body and cords carry the music, her mind on trying to hold the image of the dam, her eyes on the drawings, attempting to project them in place in the narrow gorge below.

  “My words must start the damming of the river here below . . .”

  Even from the first words, the sky seemed to silver, and to freeze—a silver-blue hemisphere frozen in time. From the players’separate parts—each note rang like a tiny bell, even the sweet singing of the strings, and the deeper bass of the falk horn.

  Anna forced her thoughts back to the image of the dam and to the song. . . .

  “With a building of the strongest stones from where the waters flow . . .”

  The melody from the players welled up around her, and the sorceress half smiled. Never had they sounded so good, so solid.

  “. . . setting every block into the place that it must hold . . .”

  The phrasing flowed, just as she had planned.

  Just before the last chorus, Anna could sense an enormous pressure behind even the silver-blue sky, and she could feel her knees trembling. Even with all the help of the players, Anna had this feeling she wasn’t going to make it. Lights seemed to flash around her, and the ground groaned and rumbled.

  She hung on, concentrating on the last words and the notes.

  “Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia;

  glory, glory, halleluia, these stones will last and last!”

  She slumped, panting. Never . . . so . . . hard. . . . Such a short song. . . .

  THRUMMMMM!!!

  The entire heavens pulsated with a series of chords, the chords seemingly unheard by any but Anna, and silver clouds that were mist and yet not mist, filled the gorge. Underneath the ground trembled, and shook.

  Farinelli half whuffed, half screamed, then half reared, dragging Lejun and his mount uphill and away from the river.

  “. . . dissonance!”

  For a moment, utter silence, a blanket of silence that muffled absolutely all attempt at sound, descended.

  THRUMMMM!!!

  With the second chord, sound resumed, and the silver mists over the river rose and boiled away. The haze lifted, showing a picture-perfect arching dam of glistening gray stone. The spillway was even there.

  Anna could sense tears welling up in her eyes. She tried to take a deep breath—and couldn’t. Damned asthma. . . .

  The world turned red, and then black and swirled around her.

  82

  DUMARIA, DUMAR

  The two lords, one of Dumar, one of Sturinn, sit on opposite sides of the low table which bears a large carafe of wine, a bowl of honeyed nuts, and one of dried fruit. Ehara lowers the scroll and looks at Sea-Marshal jerRestin. “And how far upstream is the Falche dry?”

  “Not a drop of water flows over the first cataract or the second. Your sorceress has stopped the entire Falche. Even I would not have thought it possible.”

  “She’s hardly my sorceress, Sea-Marshal,” Ehara says with a ragged laugh. “It was done, Sea-Priest. Don’t tell me how you would not have believed it possible. Half your fleet sits grounded in the mud below Dumaria. The waters of the Envaryl lap around their hulls. What of the other half?”

  “They remain at Narial. The bay is tidal.” JerRestin reaches for a handful of honeyed nuts. He eats them deliberately.

  Ehara lifts the scroll he has been reading. “The sorceress has sent this. She has suggested that it might be better for me and my people if the Sturinnese fleet returned to Sturinn.” He extends the scroll to jerRestin.

  The Sea-Marshal reads slowly. “Behind the polite words, she is ordering you to dismiss us . . . and to pay her thousands of golds.”

  “It does not sound like such a bad idea, at least until the river is returned to us.”

  “You do not wish to pay all those golds. Nor do we wish that, either. The sorceress cannot hold back such a mighty river forever. It will not hurt to wait.” The Sea-Marshal smiles. “In any case, the ships at Dumaria cannot sail anywhere.”

  “What if I requested you to leave?” asks Ehara.

  “I would take your request, and then I would send it to the Maitre. It is on his orders that I am here.”

  “I see.”

  “I think you do, Lord Ehara. Shall we have some of that wine while we wait for the sorceress to act? It may be some time. You know she is prostrate. The scroll might not even be her work. She reached beyond herself, and she may not recover. Often those who do such great works do not recover.” JerRestin smiles. “Some wine?” he repeats.

  “Ah . . . of course.”

  83

  Anna opened burning and blurred eyes, slowly, painfully.

  Jecks looked solemnly at her, propped up as she was by lumpy pillows in the high-backed bed. She met his glance for a moment, then closed her eyes against the pounding headache and the miniature starbursts that flashed before her.

  When she opened them again, the white-haired lord sat in the chair by her bed.

  “My lady . . . Lady Anna . . . you cannot continue like this.” Jecks extended a goblet. “It is wine, honeyed. You must drink.”

  Anna drank. Then she closed her eyes for a moment.

  “You must eat and drink more before you sleep.”

  Obediently, she forced her eyes back open and took another sip of the wine, far too sweet for her preference. She tried to get her eyes to focus on the white-haired lord, but one moment he seemed clear, and the next a silvered fuzzy image.

  “Another,” he urged inexorably.

  She took a small sip. A thought struggled somewhere, and finally she asked, “The . . . message?”

  “As you ordered, I did send it, under the blue flag of messages and harmony. Lord Ehara doubtless did not feel such harmony when he received your words.”

  “Received?” Anna rasped.

  “You have lain like one enchanted or dead for nearly a week. The message has surely been delivered, but there has been no time for a reply. We have forced water into you, but you are thin unto death.” He extended a small fragment of bread. “You must eat.”

  Anna slowly chewed the bread, hard as it was with a dry mouth, then let Jecks hold the goblet again as she drank. “The darn . . . ?”

  “You have wrought a mighty sorcery,” he admitted, offering another small fragment of bread. “The river has filled the gorge for three deks and slowed its flow for another five. . . . And it has yet to creep halfway, nay not even a fourth part of the way, up those stones your sorcery laid.”

  “Is any . . . water going . . . past . . . ?”

  “Beyond the dam are only sands and drying rocks. And more sand and dry rock. Before long, Lord Birfels worries that the waters will flood the fields near Emor.”

  Emor? Anna hadn’t even heard
of Emor.

  “That is a small hamlet fifteen deks upstream of Abenfel.” Jecks pressed another square of dark bread upon her.

  “Be . . . awhile,” mumbled Anna as she struggled with the bread. “Years. It’s a deep gorge.”

  “Not as deep as before. The waters have covered the sands and the shores, and it is a lake of blue.” He offered more bread.

  Chewing the bread took effort, and her jaws moved as though they were made of lead. She swallowed and took another sip of wine.

  Her eyes felt heavy, far too heavy, and she could no longer keep them open.

  84

  PAMR, DEFALK

  I can’t believe what Deurn said you had back here,” 1 says the thin and wispy-bearded youth. “I just had to see.”

  “You’ll see, Elcean,” promises the young chandler. “It is rather remarkable.” He closes the door to the small room, and the slow and rhythmic drumming enfolds them—thurummm thurumm thurummm . . . thurumm . . .

  “Oh . . .”

  On the pedestal is an almost life-sized statue of a voluptuous brunette, with an impossibly slender waist and dark hair that falls against creamy skin like a gossamer cloak, just barely covering her breasts. The hair shimmers and shifts ever so slightly in the still air, yet the naked woman—or statue—does not move.

  “Oh . . . Farsenn . . . can I touch her?”

  “That might not be a good idea,” says the chandler. “At least, not until you listen to me. She won’t go anywhere.”

  “I can look . . .”

  Farsenn slips into song, bass voice intertwining with the rhythm of the drum.

  “Men of Pamr, heed no woman’s song,

  for Farsenn will make you proud and strong . . .”

  When the spell ends, Farsenn blinks, then squints before he resumes smiling. “You see? We men need to stand together these days, don’t we?”

  “ ’Course . . . like you say.” Elcean continues to stare at the brunette. “Sure is pretty.”

  The drumbeat dies, and Farsenn smiles conspiratorially. “Just don’t tell any of the women. . . . You know what I mean?”

  Elcean flushes.

  “It was good of you to come to see me.” Farsenn makes a vague gesture toward the door. Elcean follows the gesture, and the chandler follows him.

  Once the door closes, the drummer rises and glances at the rough clay figure that stands on the crude wooden pedestal, a figure no more than a yard and a half tall. Then he wipes his steaming forehead, then massages it. He also blinks as though he has difficulty seeing clearly.

  85

  Anna looked at the empty tray on the writing table before her. Had she eaten all that? Every time she pushed her sorcery, she paid, and paid more, it seemed. That was another reason why she wanted to see if she could get Ehara to push the Sturinnese out.

  “It won’t happen. . . .” she murmured to herself. All that would happen was that the Falche would fill up over the next few years, the Dumaran people would suffer, and she’d take the blame. The Sturinnese would stay put, and she and Jecks would have to decide whether a war in Dumar was worth it. And she would either have to rely on brute-force sorcery to devastate Dumar and prevent a worse mess later, or she could be reasonable, according to conventional lordly wisdom, and wait for a Sturinnesebacked invasion or worse in a year or two. By then, Ebra would be in the middle of a civil war, or the war would be over and she’d have another growing enemy to the east while Konsstin would be bringing sorcerers and armies into Neserea to the west.

  Yet . . . how could she live with herself if she didn’t try something else? Even if it happened to be a long shot?

  She snorted. Of course she could forget Dumar for a time. But then she would have to use force in Ebra to secure Defalk’s eastern borders, and that would probably encourage the Sturinnese to attack southern Defalk from Dumar when she was weeks away in Ebra and could do nothing.

  Outside was gray. That she could tell, but it wasn’t raining, just hot and gray. Even in the thin shift that wasn’t hers, she felt hot, and sweaty, and smelly. She wanted a bath, not a sponge bath, and not a bath in the lukewarm water Defalkans called hot. She wanted a hot and steaming bath, and she wasn’t going to get it anytime soon. Not when even boiling water cooled on the long trip up from the kitchens and the mere thought of sorcery sent a screaming pain across her temples.

  Still, she was better. She wasn’t quite so gaunt, and she could eat, and take short walks, and Jecks didn’t look at her as though she were about to die. Yet it seemed her recovery was taking longer than after other similar large spells.

  Outside the window the finches twittered, and Anna smiled at the calls that were half song, half argument.

  Her eyes flicked to the mirror on the wall—a mirror she could use just as a mirror, thanks to the reflecting pool. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see her reflection, not yet, anyway.

  Thrap!

  “Yes?” she said warily.

  Jecks peered in. “Lady Anna?”

  “Come on in.” After he entered, she gestured to the chair across the writing desk from her.

  “You look better,” Jecks offered as he seated himself. “Not as though I’d die on the spot?” Anna reseated herself.

  “You are surely in better health,” he said with a smile.

  “Because I’m back to my old snippy self?” She even felt like smiling in return.

  “All were worried.”

  “You were upset because you don’t see what this sorcery will accomplish besides flooding fields?”

  “And killing Defalk’s sole hope of prevailing against the Liedfuhr.” He smiled. “I mean you, my lady.”

  “You don’t worry about Sturinn?”

  “We have no ports and need little of what is traded across the Western Sea.”

  “Forty ships in Dumar doesn’t bother you?”

  “The Liedfuhr has fifty thousand lancers, it is said.” Jecks shrugged. “Forty ships carried a tenth of that number.”

  Anna forced a smile. Jecks was being logical, and she couldn’t fight logic with logic. Her intuition told her he was wrong, that Sturinn posed a far greater danger than Mansuur. But how could she convince him’She took a slow breath.

  “You fear Sturinn more than Mansuur.” His words were even, not quite a question.

  “Yes. I can’t explain why or how, but Sturinn is a greater danger.” Anna took a sip of the wine, a drier red that was far better than the honeyed stuff she’d swallowed when first recovering. Her legs felt stiff, and she pushed back the straight-backed chair and stood.

  Why did she feel like an arthritic old woman? In the mirror, she looked like a worn-out twenty-year-old, but that wasn’t the way she felt at the moment.

  She needed to get stronger. That she felt, but it had been almost two weeks since the dam had been completed, and she was still slow and tired. Each day she tried to walk farther, get more exercise, but she continued to feel drained.

  Her feet took her to the window, and to the gray clouds piling in from the east.

  “Sturinn may be a greater danger,” ventured Jecks, “but Mansuur is closer.”

  Anna nodded. She couldn’t argue with that, either. “We’ll have to do something about Dumar or Ebra.”

  “None will gainsay your right to back one side in the conflict there,” Jecks pointed out.

  More damned politics. “I suppose not. We don’t piss off either the Sea-Priests or Konsstin, not openly.” She shook her head. Or worry the beloved lords of the Thirty-three . . . Lord!

  “You could go by way of Synope,” Jecks offered placatingly.

  “I could.” Why did she feel so damned tired? She yawned. “I still think Dumar is the bigger problem.”

  “You still are tired.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, reluctantly. Her eyes felt heavy. Just how long would it take for her to feel normal again? He stood. “I must go.”

  Anna walked toward the high bed. Her eyes were closed within moments of the clunk of the door.
>
  86

  ESARIA, NESEREA

  The heavy, gilt-framed mirror in the hallway to the bedchamber swings away from the wall. A single low candle lights the corridor behind the barred door. On the other side of the door are two Mansuuran lancers.

  After several moments, a cloaked figure slips from the opening made by the swiveled mirror and toward the archway leading to the bedchamber. In the bed a man lies, sleeping on his side, his closed eyes facing the archway. He does not move as the intruder enters the room.

  The figure in deep brown, far less visible at night than black, steps up to the table by the bed, deftly takes the stoppered wine pitcher from the tray and replaces it with another.

  As silently as he has come, the intruder eases his way back behind the mirror. The mirror swings back into place, and without even a click, seats itself so that it again appears built into the wall.

  As he steps down the stairs to the narrow passage set partly below floor level, Rabyn murmurs, “You will notice nothing, taste nothing, good Nubara. Not for a long, long time.”

  He passes several other niches in the wall, each behind a mirror. He also must duck upon occasion when the passageway’s ceiling lowers to accommodate windows in those rooms it borders. He turns two more corners and comes to the place where he entered.

  There, at the top of the three narrow steps, he presses a lever, and another mirror swings out from the wall. Once he is inside his own rooms, he closes the mirror and carefully checks the boss on the left side, wiping it carefully with the fabric of the brown cloak.

  With a smile, he walks to his dressing room, stopping in front of the three-yard-wide polished-wood wardrobe, and drawing wide the double doors. After he opens the hidden compartment at the back of the wardrobe and replaces the enveloping brown cloak, his eyes go to the miniature portrait on the long dressing table.