Changer's Moon

by Clayton, Jo;

  “One spark,” he whispered, so softly she almost didn’t hear him. He was right, a spark was all that horrible stuff needed. But it looked impossible. The Nor wouldn’t let fire get near those barrels, and they were sticking tight as fleas.

  Bella stirred, turned her face toward them. She was worn too, was brown and dark as damp earth now, her cousin Biel was brown and dark; dirt and oil and sweat and soot had dulled the fine gold patina of their skin, had darkened the bright gold hair to the color of last year’s leaves rotting back into the earth. “We can get close,” Bella said. She chuckled. “Long as we try it down wind.” She sobered. “They’re focused on the wall. Look at them. Gloating, I’d say. And the Ogogehians are staying well away from the barrels, look how careful those men are to keep the fumes from blowing on them. And look there. And there.” She began pointing out clumps of brush and cracks, working out a line of progress along the slopes that would take a careful crawler close to the hollow where the barrels were.

  Coperic followed the darting finger. “Mm.” He watched a mercenary ride his macai at a slow walk away from the barrels, holding a net sling of clay melons stiffly out from his side. One of the Nor left the barrels and rode beside him, shielding him from anything off the wall. “Nekaz Kole,” he whispered.

  Tuli took the words as the curse they were. “He don’t miss much,” she said.

  The two Nor sitting on the knoll above the barrels suddenly pulled their macain around until they were facing the mountains, their eyes searching the slopes. Hastily Coperic and Tuli went flat, the others ducking down beside them, shoving their faces into the dirt. Tuli felt the Nor eyes pass over her like an itch in the back of her neck. She didn’t move until Ildas cooed reassurance to her. She lifted her head, exploded out the dead air and sucked in a hard cold lungful of new. The others sat up and began breathing again. “Seems like they don’t want folk watching them,” Tuli said softly.

  Coperic glanced through the screen of brush. “They calmed down now.” He eased around and went snaking down the slope into the small socket eaten out of the mountainside where they usually slept. Little sunlight got through the brush, so it was chill as any icehouse. He squatted at one end and waited until the others had crowded in and settled themselves. “Had a thought,” he said.

  He let a moment pass, his eyes shut, his brows drawn together, fingers of one hand tapping on his bony knee. Shadow seeped into the wrinkles of his face and hands, carved heavy black lines into his flesh. The muscles of his face shifted just slightly, enough to turn his face into a changing web of light and dark around the strong jut of his nose. Watching him, Tuli measured the change in herself by the change she saw in him; as the days slid past, as tenday slid into tenday and the stadia dropped behind them, he had stripped away his sly bumbling tavern-host mannerisms, dropping one by one as they moved down the Highroad and settled above the army. Now he was a prowling predator, limited to a single aspect of himself, little left of the complex man she’d caught glimpses of in Oras. They were all narrowed by the hunger, the stress, the killing, the danger, with the softer sides of their natures put away for the duration of the war. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever see those times again, gentler times when she could laugh and smile and run the night fields, sometimes she wondered if she’d be able to slough the memories that even now gave her nightmares. She realized suddenly that tomorrow was her birthday. Hers and her brother’s. Teras. Fifteen? How strange. She felt more like fifty.

  Coperic opened his eyes. “Still a dozen of us,” he said slowly. “So far. Could change.” He went silent again, gazed over their heads at the dangling brush. “Comes to me, we could get down close, and when the first melons hit the wall and start burning, one, two, maybe three of us rush the barrels. Right then army, Nor, you name it, they going to be watching the wall too damn hard to be looking out for us. With some of us in ambush covering, one or two of us break through and fire the oil. If we move fast enough. In and out.” He scanned their faces again. “Anyone wants to back off, feel free. Me, I think it’s crazy, but could just maybe work. Roll the bones, come up live, come up dead, but make ’em pay.” He reached inside his vest, slipped out one of his throwing knives, looked at it a moment, slipped it back. “I’m crazy as that bitch Floarin, but I’m going in close to cover. Who’s gonna carry fire?”

  Bella’s smile was a feral grimace. “Who’s not gonna? Anyone got an uncset? Odd man out’s the fire fool.”

  Tuli snorted. “You’re all crazy. Can’t no one get close enough without those Nor spotting him, they don’t have to see you, they smell you out, Pero, and I don’t mean sweat stink. Me and Ajjin, we’re the only ones can get close enough, I got Ildas, she got her own ways.”

  “Thought you said he can’t get to the barrels.”

  “Well, he can’t. But he can shield me up to the spell-web. It’s like the Shawar shield, magic to keep out magic, magic to warn, but if those Nor are distracted enough, I can sling a fireball through the web and still stay far enough away so I don’t get my face burned off. And if I trip, there’s still the Ajjin.”

  Coperic gazed at her a long time. She could feel him fighting against letting her go while his plotter’s mind saw a dozen advantages in her plan and was working to polish aspects of it even as he resisted giving in to it. For all his acerbity and cynicism there were parts of him softer and more vulnerable than Sanani. He was fond of her, she knew that, and in a cranky way was as proud of her as if she’d been his own daughter. She’d been wary of men since Fayd, but felt nothing of that kind of thing in the way Coperic treated her. Somehow he was more important to her than anyone, even Teras. The closeness between her and Teras was over; Teras didn’t have the least idea what she was now (and she suspected he wouldn’t care if he did, he was so wrapped up in the importance of what he was doing), but Coperic knew her possibilities. That amoral and disreputable leader of thieves understood her in ways her father and even her mother never would. She saw him smile at her, a slow and reluctant smile that admitted his capitulation. “Charda, go see if you can find Ajjin. Tell her what we’re thinking and find out if she’s crazy as the rest of us.”

  Tuli parted the brush and stared as the wall began burning. Holding her breath she turned from the heavy greedy flames and glanced over the Ogogehians gathered about the barrels, then to the three Nor sitting their black demon macain, their backs to her, satisfaction in the lines of their bodies, tall, fit men clothed in power, the air shimmering about them. Gilded light she sensed rather than saw rayed out from them, weaving into a bright web that humped in a dome over the barrels and the men lounging beside them. Spun into her own web, she got to her knees, stuffed the weighted tinder in the pocket of her jacket and waited a few heartbeats longer, sneaking swift glances at the Nor, trying to judge the extent of their absorption.

  The tower began to throb behind the vuurvis fire and the fire went out and the gray stone turned a glowing new-green, lovely as polished chrysoprase. The Nor went rigid, the web-barrier vanished. Tuli sucked in a breath, let Ildas lick the tinder into a small flame. Ajjin chini got to her feet and trotted to stand beside Tuli as she rose and began whirling the sling about her head. The throb from the tower deepened and reached out farther. The air stilled and turned thicker, almost like water. As she released the fireball, sending it shooting at the nearest barrel, the lightweb was suddenly sucked from about her, Ildas squeaked and vanished; the Nor turned dull as if they’d changed to stone. She was frozen an instant with shock and loss, then wheeled and raced away. She could hear the hoarse wild screams from the wall, the burned meien shrieking, and that prodded her into a panicky scramble to put solid earth between her and the vuurvis, her back crawling in anticipation of the heat flare.

  It didn’t come. She reached the top of a slope, looked over her shoulder, stumbled to a stop and turned.

  The glowing tower drew her eyes first, but after a few ragged breaths she looked away. The barrel she’d hit was burning, but it was a low sullen fire, no
t a leaping conflagration as before. She didn’t understand it; she scowled at the pitiful flames until the Ajjin bumped her legs, calling her back to where she was. She looked down. “Right.” Brooding on the change in the Nor, she walked with slow deliberation back to the ambush where the rest of the band were waiting, ready to cover her retreat if that proved necessary. Wanting to confirm what she suspected, she looked back again. Nothing had changed, no one had moved, not the men tending the barrels, not the great Nor on top their grassy knoll. And the air maintained its thick resistance to movement. Excitement rising in her, she pushed through the brush.

  “Shoot them,” she said. “The Nor. Pero, they’re kankas without gas, their magic is being sucked out of them by something, I don’t know, but as long as that tower glows they can’t do nothing. Get ’em.”

  “Biel, Ramo, Sosai, try it.” As the three best archers in the band moved to get a cleaner shot at the Nor, Coperic rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Bella, you and the rest might’s well take advantage a that.” He nodded at the tower. “Cut us out a rambut. We down to bone on the last. After that, I think hit the Sankoise. They about ready to quit, shouldn’t take much to bog them down and make them worthless.”

  Tuli watched as the quarrels whistled through the thick unnatural air and socked home in the black forms. For several heartbeats nothing happened, as if the shafts were illusion not real. Then the three crumpled stiffly, toppled off the demon macain, fell onto the curve of the low hill and lay like discarded idols on the limp, bleached grass.

  Then the glow faded. There was a confusion of shouts and curses as the stupor wore off the army and Nekaz Kole discovered the death of the three Nor. The air came loose with a rush of ice-breath and whipped Tuli’s hair about, crept down her tunic and slid around her ribs, ribs that had no flesh on them to keep out the cold. It whipped the fire high, flung it out to the other barrels, sending a blast of heat for several body lengths on every side. Tuli shivered; in spite of that heat, she was icy with unassimiliated grief. Ildas was gone and he’d taken all warmth from her.

  Coperic saw the grief she was fighting to deny. He laid his arm across her shoulders, squeezed gently. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ildas.” Her voice cracked. She licked her lips. “He’s gone.”

  “What happened?”

  “It took him just as it took the Nor-magic. I don’t know, maybe it … it swallowed him.” She leaned against Coperic, felt his wiry strength leaking into her, comforting her. “Like there was something there in the tower I mean that was sucking power out of everything.…” Her voice trailed off; she wriggled around until her face was tucked into the hollow between his neck and shoulder; she clung to him, her eyes dry though she was shuddering as if she sobbed; for a moment she thrust aside everything that had happened to her and let herself be a baby again, let him hold her and comfort her.

  It couldn’t last. She pulled away from him. She wasn’t a baby and she couldn’t sustain the illusion that she was. Wind buffeted at her, shouts and screams came more clearly, Biel and the others were back, grinning at the success of their efforts. The tower was dark, only a ghost of the jewel glow left in the stone. Elsewhere along the wall the oil still burned and the massive wooden gates were beginning to char. The fire at the barrels leaped high, a thrusting tongue of flame and smoke, geysering up and up, swaying, throwing out burning bits that kept everyone at a distance.

  She watched it, weary and warming in the crook of Coperic’s arm. She felt empty, no hatred, no triumph, no anger left to prod her. A soft warmth brushed her calf, a coo fluttered through her head. She looked down. “Didi,” she whispered and bent forward a little, opening her arms, cooing her extravagant delight as Ildas leaped up and settled against her ribs. She straightened, stroking him into rapture, glanced up; her mouth dropped open, she pointed, gasped, “Look.”

  Immense undulating serpentine shapes floated above the Biserica valley, dragons made of bending glass with waves of color rippling across their transparent scales like silent music. Tuli’s body throbbed to the beauty of those beings and the sinuous songs they were weaving. She held Ildas close, felt Coperic strong and steady behind her, watched the glass dragons invent their chorales and knew contentment so intense that every other emotion paled before it.

  16

  Hate coiled in a tainted mist through the army. The grinding sullen hate of the Sankoise that embraced the meien and the rest of the Biserica’s defenders, the norits that drove them at the wall again and again, drove them to slaughter, hate for Nekaz Kole who jerked like a puppet at the twitching of the Nearga Nor and twitched the Sankoise in his turn, hate finally for all other Sankoise—and a cold unrelenting hate of the Nor for the meien, the beasts (all men and women of lesser powers were beasts to the norim) that were somehow reaching through the veil of Norpower and killing them, stripping away their certainty of their invulnerability. It should not be happening. It had to be chance. It couldn’t be skill, The beasts had no such skill. But, somehow, two-thirds of their number were dead. Doubt crept in and mixed with fear and as the holes gaped larger in their certainty, their hatred intensified, feeding on that doubt and fear the way vuurvis fire fed on flesh.

  Where the Ogogehians were, the miasma stank more of anger than of hate, a spreading subterranean rage at Nekaz Kole for getting them into this morass. They were mercenaries and death was a built-in risk, but a dead man’s wages were of no use to him. Because Nekaz Kole had been a prudent, capable and occasionally brilliant commander who’d bought them loot and glory with a minimum of casualties, they’d followed him with confidence, making scurrilous but affectionate jokes about his appetites and idiosyncrasies. He’d gone from success to success until he was a serious threat to the power back home of the older generals, but now he was losing men and reputation equally. If he went down here, he was dead, no matter how long he lived. Five hundred defeating five thousand. He knew only too well the sneers and contempt, the stink of failure that would follow him the rest of his days, corroding all he touched.

  Nekaz Kole sat his rambut above the catapults still hurling vuurvis at the massive gates, lobbing some high so it splashed into the openway between the inner and outer gates. An easy victory, Floarin said. Lean on them a little and they’ll cave. Easy money. He leaned forward, patted his rambut’s neck, looked down the slope at his disaffected army. The Norim had echoed her words. An easy victory. Just the wall. Once you take that, it’s over. They can’t have more than five hundred or so meien, only women, some of them too old to be worth much. He discounted their assurances and listened to their numbers and succumbed to temptation. Even then he knew it was probably a mistake; experience had taught him long ago that luck’s fair face concealed a poisoned barb; it had also taught him that his employers were generally ignorant and always concealed something no matter how forthright they seemed. Not for the first time he wondered what it was the Nor weren’t telling him. He seldom asked for reasons when the covenants were signed, only for what result his employer desired. The reasons they hired him meant nothing to him and he’d early grown weary of listening to them justify themselves. The rhetoric bubbling out from Floarin and scarcely less abundantly from the Nor around her had been so familiar and so boring he hadn’t bothered to listen, but spent the time planning the best ways of spending that gold, daydreaming instead of picking through the rubbish for clues to the barb that had to be there, luck’s unlovely face. He shook off vain regrets; he’d signed the thing, there was no escaping from that; breaking the covenants would sink him more thoroughly than this miserably botched campaign. He scowled at the gates. The vuurvis was eating slowly into them, held back a little by those triply cursed witches, but only a little. He glanced at the gray blur that marked the position of the sun. Dawn would see the gates so weakened that a few stones lobbed at them would shatter them. Have to wait till the vuurvis burned out. It wasn’t going to be neat or fancy, just pushing enough men through the gap to roll over that puny force inside. By tomorrow afternoon
he was going to be in the Biserica’s Heart. He thought briefly about what was going to happen to the women and girls when the Biserica fell, but shrugged off vague regrets; his men needed something to take the edge off their anger. He straightened his back and contemplated the mountains stretching beyond the east end of the wall. The last of the Sleykynin were somewhere in those and in the mountains on the west side of the valley, circling round to come on the Biserica from the rear—if they hadn’t decided the whole operation was a loss and abandoned it. They were better at saving their skins than manning assaults, couldn’t be beat if you wanted an enemy cut down, but in a head-on clash they were too undisciplined, too inclined to fight as individuals rather than melding into an effective team. Probably he could count on their fanatical hatred of the meien to bring them into the valley, but he wasn’t going to depend on them. Any distraction they provided would be a help, though Hag only knew what Hern and Yael-mri were hoarding to use against him if he got past the wall—when he got past the wall. He watched the gates burning and smiled. There was no stopping him now. One way or another he was in.

  He heard screes of alarm from the traxim and looked up. Immense glass dragons undulated above the valley. One of them coiled about a trax and began squeezing. The trax vanished like a punctured soap bubble. The remaining traxim fled. Kole ground his teeth together, raging at the chance that had robbed him of his ability to see what the defenders were doing. He glanced at the Nor beside him, his face carefully masked to hide the flare of loathing he felt for the sorcerers who’d sucked him into this debacle with their promises of powerful aid and who’d proved so feeble since. He forced himself to relax. “What are those? What do they mean?”