Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Then Eben Amnachudran rode his horse out in front of the little company, turned to face the men, and declared in a clear, loud voice, “Beguchren Teshrichten, the king’s own mage, is here to stop that country of sand and fire from coming down across all our homes. He did not bring an army from the south, because he does not need one. What he needs is the honest courage and resolution of ordinary men of the north, and he knew he would find that waiting here for him. And so he has.” Then, in the great silence he had created, he turned, deliberately, toward the silver-eyed mage. “My lord, what will you have of us?”

  “Courage and resolution,” Beguchren answered, just as loudly and clearly. “We will go down into the desert, and when we are finished here, it will be once again a country of earth.”

  “As you command, my lord,” Amnachudran said formally. He was not carrying a spear, but he lifted his arm and pointed forward, and the officers took up the command in their sharp, carrying voices, and they all went down the hill, along the ripple in the red sand that marked the bed of the dry Teschanken, and into the griffins’ desert. At the edge of the desert, Amnachudran swung off his horse and stripped the saddle and bridle from it and let it go, and Beguchren did the same. And then they went down into the country of fire.

  Little flames flickered amid the sands, and the towering sharp-edged cliffs stood hard against the fierce, brazen light that lay heavily across the desert, nothing like the ordinary sunlight in even the hottest southern summer. Gereint vividly remembered the brutal hammering power of the desert sun. He closed his eyes, swallowing, as he walked beside Beguchren, across the boundary, and out of the country of earth. But though he could tell when he crossed the boundary, the heat did not come down from the molten sky nor strike up from the fiery sands with anything of the ferocity he recalled, and he opened his eyes again in astonishment.

  The fires died away as Beguchren walked across the desert, and the red sand somehow took on a softer look, as though it might lie thinly over ordinary soil. As all the men followed him, the desert itself gave way beneath them and around them, yielding to his power, and although the light pounded down upon the surrounding desert, it lay on them gently, and a sharp wind followed them from the south, bringing the scents of earth and water and growing things into the country of fire.

  Gereint looked sharply at Beguchren. The mage’s face was calm, but his eyes were narrowed and his mouth set hard with strain. Gereint wanted to ask, How long can you keep earth under our feet and a natural light over our heads? But if he asked, everyone who heard would know there was a question about it. So he did not ask.

  “We will go this way,” Beguchren said quietly, and walked straight forward into the stark desert, between the high mountains, which now seemed much farther away, half hidden by—well, not by dust nor by haze but seemingly by some quality of the air itself. Amnachudran nodded in return and waved to his captains, and the company strode straight ahead almost without hesitation.

  Before them, the fire died down under the sand; above them, the sky softened from its terrible metallic ferocity; to either side of their line of march, the sunlight lay gently on the desert. Gereint understood, now, why Beguchren had been so certain that the griffins would come down to meet them. This was not a challenge that could be let pass.

  And on that thought, the griffins came. They came from the west, out of the blaze of the lowering sun, slicing across the face of the mountains alone or in small groups, cutting paths of stark beauty through the empty sky. Gereint first thought there might be about a hundred of them all together, but more came, and more after those, and he saw, appalled, that there actually were many more griffins than they had brought men.

  Even in those first moments, when they were still distant, no one could have mistaken the griffins for hawks or eagles or any bird; the light that struck off their wings was too harsh and their beaks flashed like metal. They cried out in high, fierce shrieks like hunting eagles, and the sky behind them turned red with the violence of wind-driven sand; fire scattered down across the sand from the wind of their wings.

  “We will hold them here,” Beguchren declared, in a sharp, loud voice meant to carry. “As long as we hold firm, they will not be able to come down as they wish. Remember what we are about, do you hear? Hold, hold, and I shall protect you. Do you understand?”

  They had discussed this, but it was not the same when one actually watched the griffins come sweeping across the wind. Eben Amnachudran had gone dead pale, but he nodded and turned to the men. Beguchren did not watch him, but gripped Gereint’s arm and nodded aside, to where the red desert mounted up a rugged hill. Gereint thought he merely meant to take a place up on that hill where he could be seen, like a talisman. Then he saw the frost that spangled the sand where the mage set each foot, spreading outward from where he walked, and realized that a cold wind had risen and was blowing with increasing force past them from the south. After that, it occurred to him that Beguchren meant to teach him this power, and then he was truly frightened, because the glittering ice that challenged this desert was nothing he understood at all.

  They did not go far, but when they turned, the griffins were almost upon them. They looked enormous; he had not realized they were so large: the size of lions, he thought first, but they had not even yet arrived and grew still larger in the vast sky; the size of ponies, and then heavy cart horses, and then at last they came down, with appalling speed: splendid and terrible creatures of bronze and copper and gold and jet, with ferocious talons and brilliant inhuman eyes. But the fire they brought with them only spattered harmlessly against Beguchren’s cold wind, and the men held firm, their spear points glittering like chips of ice in the sunlight; arrows whistled into the sky, very few at first and then more: Most of the men had been too stunned to shoot at once. Watching the arrows rise, Gereint said, without thinking, “I should have made those arrows—or some of them—”

  “There wasn’t time,” Beguchren answered. “I put my name and intent into them. That isn’t quite the same as making them for this exact purpose, but it will serve.”

  Rather than striking down through the arrows and into the waiting spears, the griffins spun away to every side and climbed swiftly back into the heights of the air. They were not shrieking now: They were silent. But Gereint could hear the wind rushing through their great wings, with a sound like stiff cloth in a high wind or, to a sufficiently attuned imagination, like the roaring of a fire. The arrows did not reach them but began to fall back to the ground. Every one of them burst into flames before it struck the sand.

  “We turned them,” Gereint said to Beguchren, and he found that his voice was shaking, and he was not even ashamed of that. And then, with perhaps more accuracy: “You turned them.”

  The cold mage barely seemed to hear him. His head was back at a sharp angle: He stared upward with an almost frightening intensity. “He is not here,” he said, not so much to Gereint as to himself. “She is not here; that is why they turn aside. Where are they? Do they think I am not serious in my challenge?”

  Gereint did not know how to answer.

  “They will answer me, if I must turn every grain of sand to good earth and every rising flame to a chip of ice,” the mage declared. He waved sharply at Amnachudran, and the scholar called out to his captains, and the little company began to make its way along the dry path of the river, west and north, up the rising slope of the foothills. Their spear points dipped and rose as they marched, in series, like flashing ripples rolling across a lake. They did not call out or shout; even the commands of the officers seemed muted. As though commanded to review before their lord, every row of men turned to look up at the cold mage as they passed his position. For reassurance, Gereint knew. From his deliberate hauteur, Beguchren knew it too.

  The griffins wheeled in a great circle, now very high aloft, now so low the long feathers of their wing tips brushed the sand. But they did not come within bowshot of the company. They were glorious and terrible. Their feathers might have
been beaten out of bronze and then traced with copper or gold; powerful muscles rippled under lion haunches as golden as the purest metal. Their beaks and talons flashed like knives and their fierce eyes were flaming gold or coal black or brilliant copper. One griffin was pure white, the white of the hottest flame at the fiercest forge; another nearly as pure a black, but with gold barring the long feathers of its wings and dappling its haunches; a third, black flecked with crimson and copper. But they did not close against the men, but only swept up and around and down again in their great circling path.

  “They’re waiting,” Gereint said suddenly, realizing this must be true.

  “Yes,” Beguchren answered, but absently, as though he barely heard. “For their human fire mage who can keep them whole. They will not come down against our arrows and spears until she is here. She must come. They cannot possibly mean to permit our incursion, and they will not attack without her. Maybe they are waiting for Kairaithin—maybe she is waiting for Kairaithin. Ah!”

  This last exclamation marked the appearance of another griffin. It did not soar in from the deep desert as the others had; it did not come down from the heights or out of the crimson sunset in the west as the sun slid down on its slow path beyond the mountains. The griffin was simply there, balancing on the fiery wind, out of bowshot but close enough to make out clearly.

  The new griffin was slim and graceful; large, to be sure, yet smaller than most of the other griffins. It was a rich dark brown, the feathers of its wings barred with gold. On its back, as on a horse, perched a small human form.

  The pair spiraled around and slid down across the wind, and as they approached, Gereint saw that the rider was a girl. Only she wasn’t really a girl. Gereint stared, trying to understand where the difference lay. It was a little like looking at a very fine statue of a woman: It might mimic the form of a woman very, very well… but no one could possibly mistake the carved stone for a living woman. This girl was living, but it was immediately obvious that she was somehow not human. Her fine hair blew around her face like gossamer thread spun out of white-gold flame; her skin seemed translucent, as though almost-visible light burned through it; her face was alight with a terrifying inhuman exultation. Her hands were buried in the feathers of the brown griffin’s neck. She was laughing. Gereint flinched from the sound of her laughter; he could not understand where the difference lay, but it was not the laughter of a human woman.

  “There,” said Beguchren, his voice urgent and tense. He swung to face Gereint, his fine face set hard, his ice-pale eyes intent. His small hands locked around Gereint’s broad wrists. “And their mage is not even here. There will never be a better time! Do it now!”

  Beguchren had refused to explain in detail how Gereint was to remake himself into a mage, saying that a maker had to find his own way to any making. Gereint had accepted this vague instruction at the time, turning over in his mind possible methods by which the “self” might be “remade.” He’d thought he understood, in principle, how it might be done. But all this vague advice and subsequent thought seemed a good deal less helpful now. He had intended to make himself into a mage for Beguchren; he had come into the country of burning sands to do precisely that; he knew perfectly well that the lives of everyone in the company depended on his ability to do it. But now it came to the moment, he had no idea how it might be done.

  Beguchren saw his helplessness, but the cold mage only shook his head. “I cannot help you. If you do not find the way, it was all for nothing and we will all die here: Our bones will burn to ash and blow away in the wind and the desert will lie across our rivers forever—”

  “I know!” Gereint exclaimed.

  Beguchren gave him a tense nod, let him go, and turned to stare down at the company of men. It was not yet quite besieged; the griffins, welcoming their human fire mage, had raised their burning wind and come at last down upon the men. But arrows flickered out into that savage wind, and spears tilted and rose, and Beguchren drove up, from the now-distant country of earth, a stinging wind that glittered with ice crystals, and so the griffins did not, as yet, close to battle.

  If we do not achieve victory swiftly, we will surely be defeated, Beguchren had said, and Gereint had understood exactly how he was expected to contribute to that victory. Now, staring instead down the sweep of the desert straight into defeat, it occurred to him for the first time that Beguchren might have meant the little company of men not only serve as a feint against the griffins, but also to drive him forward: We will all die here, our bones will burn to ash and blow away in the wind… Yes, the cold mage had brought them deliberately into peril and set all their lives in Gereint’s hands. Anger drove him, and despair. He dropped to his knees on the sand, burying his hands in it.

  The sand was, in a strange way, living—not as good garden soil was living, but alive with fire. It was unalterably opposed to everything he loved; it would destroy anything of earth that it touched… The magic of earth ran through him: He knew it, tried to feel it; the effort was like trying to feel the flow of blood in his veins. It was impossible to truly feel something so integral to his body and to life.

  Except that the power of earth was at such odds with the power of fire, and in the conflict that blazed between the two he almost thought he could perceive both… Rising, acting on nothing like a thought, merely on impulse borne out of terror and desperation, he reached out, jerked the knife off Beguchren’s belt, tossed the sheath aside, caught the mage’s wrist in a hard grip, gave Beguchren one instant to see his intention, and flicked the tip of the knife sharply against the palm of the mage’s hand. Then his own, and he closed his hand hard around Beguchren’s small hand, palm against palm.

  It was not any kind of technique he’d ever read about or thought of, nothing that would have been useful when working with wood or stone or metal or any normal material. But he shut his eyes and defined blood as symbolic of self; Beguchren’s a cold mage’s self and his a maker’s, and he did something with their mingled blood he could never have described but more or less seemed to recognize. And then he followed the pattern he had made, or completed, or perceived. It was not a pattern he understood, but he followed it anyway, and felt his blood, or mind, or self, slide with surprising ease into that shared pattern and then follow a half-forgotten intention at last into the pattern of magecraft.

  Doing so, he died. It was like death. He had not understood what it would be like: like a shattering of memory and identity, like the flowing out of his heart’s blood. He would have fought this loss if he had understood how to fight it, but it was already too late to undo it. He struggled, but it was like the struggle of a drowning man against the ripping current of a river; there was no firm ground beneath him and the air was closed away from him, unreachable… He was drowning, not in water but in a wild tide that he recognized, dimly, as magecraft. Something integral to everything he had been cracked across, and something else rose in its place, as though one building had been torn down to make room for another.

  Gereint drew a hard, shuddering breath and… opened his eyes. He had not been aware of closing them.

  The desert had changed. It was still starkly beautiful, stretched out under the bloody sky, reflecting the last fire of the setting sun. But it had become not merely terrible but dreadful. He shuddered uncontrollably, looking out at it: It pressed at him with suffocating force. It would kill him if it could, and burn his bones to ash that would blow away on the wind. It wanted him to die. He had felt this before, but now the sense was a hundred times stronger and somehow more personal, as though the desert almost had an actual self of its own that was utterly opposed to everything natural and human.

  Like the desert, the griffins had become dreadful. He remembered clearly that he had found them beautiful. But now he saw that they were profoundly inimical, in a way he’d previously completely failed to understand. And the brown griffin and the once-human girl were far the worst. They appalled him. He choked on revulsion against them…

  A s
trong, small hand closed on his shoulder and he looked up, swaying because the desert underfoot seemed to shift with anger; he thought it would burst into flame beneath him and spun a web of frozen quiet across the sand to hold it quiescent.

  Then Beguchren moved to face him, set a hand on his other shoulder as well, and met Gereint’s eyes. His silver eyes were filled with ice and intensity. Without hesitation, with a skill and power that Gereint could not understand, could barely recognize, Beguchren stripped the new power from his blood and mind and self, turned, and sent a glittering net of ice and power flashing through the hot wind toward the girl and her griffin companion.

  Gereint folded down to the sand, unable to brace himself up even on hands and knees. He felt not merely weakened but half blinded and deafened and all but disembodied by the loss of power; worse, he felt somehow that the world itself had been stripped of presence and reality, that what remained was nothing but an attenuated echo of the world that had surrounded him a moment earlier.

  But the brown griffin staggered in the air, crying out in a high harsh voice as the icy net closed around it. The girl cried out as well, her voice high and sweet and not at all human.

  And a massive griffin, black as charcoal, touched with red the color of smoldering embers, blazed out of the wind between Beguchren and the brown griffin, and Beguchren’s net shattered into shards of ice that dissolved into the fiery light of the desert sunset.

  Gereint thought he shouted, but his voice was only a thin gasp.

  Beside him, Beguchren made no sound at all, but turned to face the dark griffin, his expression strained and tense, his eyes filled with a pure and frozen blaze of power that had nothing to do with desert fire.

  In the west, the sky burned with a crimson light as the sun sank at last beyond the fiery horizon. Then the light died, and the hard desert night crashed down around them. Yet the darkness was broken by a bloody light that seemed to emanate from the fiery wind or from the griffins themselves, and from a frosted silvery radiance that surrounded the cold mage. By that light, Gereint could see the great black griffin stoop down across the sky toward Beguchren, and he saw Beguchren take a small step backward, and it occurred to him, for the first time as a serious possibility, that the cold mage might, despite everything, simply find himself overmatched in this challenge. But Gereint did not have enough strength remaining to be afraid. The darkness closed in upon him, a greater darkness than even the desert night could impose, and his awareness spiraled down into the dark, and dissolved in it, and was gone.