Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Lord Bertaud gently freed his wrists from her grasp, but then he took and pressed her hand in reassurance. He said to the griffin mage, “Kairaithin…”

  “Hush!” said the griffin mage, lifting his head suddenly, as though he had heard a shout. Tehre listened, but she heard nothing at all—nothing save the breeze in the oaks. But the griffin mage took a swift step back away from the fire. He said, his eyes on Lord Bertaud, “I must go.”

  The Feierabianden lord hesitated, glancing at Tehre. Then his mouth firmed as he made a decision and he let go of Tehre’s hand, took a step forward, and said to Kairaithin, “Take me with you.” His tone was midway between a command and a plea. “Take me with you. Us. Take us with you.”

  “There will be nothing you can do,” the griffin mage said harshly. “Except one thing. And will you do that, man?”

  Lord Bertaud hesitated and then shook his head. He answered in a low voice, “No. I won’t. I don’t want to.” He lifted his head, then, and stared into Kairaithin’s black, unhuman eyes. “If you were presented now with the same choice you were given at Minas Ford, how would you choose?”

  The griffin mage did not answer.

  Tehre stared from one of them to the other, aware that she did not understand everything that either of them meant. She hardly understood anything, and that was a dangerous ignorance if the griffins truly meant to destroy Casmantium and had the power to do it. As both Lord Bertaud and Kairaithin seemed to believe.

  “I must go,” Kairaithin said suddenly, sharply. “Beguchren Teshrichten has struck into our desert. Man, I must go.”

  “Beguchren?” Tehre said, startled and intensely relieved. “Oh, maybe it will be all right, then—he’s not alone, is he?” She thought of Gereint. And of her father. Maybe her mother had fled south? Maybe everyone had; except what if Beguchren Teshrichten had needed help of some kind, any kind? Her father would have stayed to help the king’s mage if he thought he could be any use. And Gereint had gone north with Beguchren, which was all very well. He was a strongly gifted maker, but she knew without any need for false modesty that he wasn’t as broadly gifted as she was—she said, “I have to be there!” and stared in appeal at Lord Bertaud, who clearly had some strange influence with the griffin mage.

  “We shall all go,” Lord Bertaud agreed. He put his arm around Tehre’s shoulders and said to Kairaithin, “We’ll all go.”

  The griffin mage did not argue; he did not, Tehre supposed, much care whether a couple of human folk trailed after him or not. Probably he was sure there was nothing they could do to interfere with the griffins’ plans; probably he was right. But she knew she had to go if she could. Though she did not know exactly why Lord Bertaud felt he had to go into danger and terror in the north, when Casmantium wasn’t even his country. But she wasn’t going to argue. She put her hand over his where he gripped her shoulder, lest he try at the last moment to leave her behind.

  Before them, Kairaithin stretched out, expanding, his shadow seemed somehow to close around him and then open violently outward. Great black wings narrowly barred with ember red stretched and opened; black feathers ran down from his fierce eagle’s head and neck, ruffled like a mane around his shoulders and chest, and melded to a powerfully muscled lion rear. His eyes were the same: black and pitiless.

  Tehre had seen illustrations of griffins, of course she had, but the sheer ferocious power that radiated from the griffin mage was nothing she had ever imagined. She tried, quite involuntarily, to back away; only Lord Bertaud’s arm stopped her. She realized she had stopped breathing; it was a surprising shock to start again. She did not look at Lord Bertaud; she could not look away from the griffin.

  Then the black wings came down, and either the red barring across the feathers caught light from the glowing embers of the fires or else flames actually flickered to life amid those feathers—Tehre couldn’t tell which—and the griffin lunged forward and up. The wind from the downbeat of his great wings struck across them, furnace hot and dry, and Tehre, staggering, realized they were now standing within a night that was utterly different from the gentler night they had left behind.

  The stars overhead were diamond bright and hard, very different from the delicate flickering stars of the country of earth. The lay of the land here was much steeper than the farmland between Dachsichten and Breidechboden, tall mountains rearing hard against sky, visible by the stars they blocked from sight. Sand shifted dangerously underfoot, heat rising from it almost as though they stood on banked coals. They did, in a way, Tehre understood suddenly: She could feel, with her maker’s sense of materials, the slow shifting heave of molten rock below the sand—not so far below.

  A wind netted with fire came down upon them, so that she cried out, brushing futilely at sparks that came down across her hair and shoulders. Lord Bertaud patted out tiny smoldering fires on her back and in her hair, and Tehre quickly did the same for him, standing on her toes to brush urgently at a small blaze eating its way across his shoulder toward his neck.

  Then a different wind rose, utterly foreign to this burning country, stinging with ice, and all the fire above and below them died.

  Somewhere close at hand, a griffin shrieked like a hunting falcon. Tehre flinched and stared toward the sound. She could not find the griffin that had cried out above them, but for the first time she realized she could see, a little. Not by the light of the stars, though each seemed to shed a tiny trace of heat and light, but by a burning glow that seemed to emanate from the griffins that slipped past high overhead and from the wind that they rode, and by the cold light that flung itself out in defiance from a nearby hillside. The source of that light was Beguchren Teshrichten, of course, who shone with silvery radiance. Near the cold mage crouched another, much larger man: Gereint, Tehre assumed. Above them, between them and the high, deadly forms of the soaring griffins, soared the dark shape of Kairaithin; the fiery wind from his wings met Beguchren’s cold wind and matched it, and drove it back toward the mage.

  And below them, far down the hill, below Tehre and Lord Bertaud, was clustered a small number of soldiers in leather and bits of mail, bright spear points rising above them, griffins spiraling through the air above them like so many falcons circling above mice, waiting only for Kairaithin’s strength to overmatch Beguchren’s before they came down to kill as they chose.

  “He’ll hold them,” Tehre said, to herself more than to Lord Bertaud; she only realized she’d spoken aloud when she heard her own voice, fragile in the vastness of the desert.

  “I don’t think so,” the foreigner answered grimly. He took a step up the hill, toward the cold mage, then hesitated and looked instead down the slope toward the threatened company.

  “No, this way,” Tehre said. She caught his hand and tugged him uphill. When he still hesitated, she added urgently, “If Beguchren falls, everyone will fall! Everything turns on him: If we can help him, that’s where we should be!”

  This was logical and obvious, and Lord Bertaud yielded. They ran up the hill together, hand-in-hand like lovers, steadying each other when the fire-laced desert wind gusted down upon them from one direction or the ice-laden cold wind came battering from the other. Neither Kairaithin nor Beguchren seemed to notice them, either to help or hinder. They struggled at last to Beguchren’s position. The cold mage still did not notice them, and Lord Bertaud hesitated, staring first at the mage and then upward toward the dark griffin he fought.

  Tehre, crouching low to keep her balance under the violent winds, went instead to Gereint. She had known it had to be him, here on this hillside with Beguchren Teshrichten. Who else would it be? And it was. But he seemed barely conscious. He was not injured. When she looked as a maker, Tehre could find no weak or broken place in the structure of his body. But he seemed dazed with horror or exhaustion. He was kneeling, sitting back on his heels, his head bowed and his hands pressed over his eyes as though in denial of the desert and the fiery wind and the griffins and everything to do with any of them. That didn’t see
m like him at all. She patted his shoulder and then his face, but though he lowered his hands, he did not seem to recognize her. Indeed, there was barely even a flicker of awareness in his eyes. And he moved as though he had to shift the weight of the world to move even a finger.

  Baffled, Tehre twisted about and tucked herself down on the ground beside him, watching Beguchren instead. The king’s mage was battling Kairaithin, that was obvious. The griffin mage had come down to the desert and now stood facing Beguchren, his massive wings half spread amid blowing sand and leaping flames. Hardly anything farther away than the griffin mage remained visible: Though she tried to see the company of men, the night and the desert wind hid them from view.

  Kairaithin lifted a feathered forelimb as though to stride forward, but then he replaced his taloned foot in precisely the same location from which he’d lifted it. Tehre thought the griffin mage had tried to move toward them and that Beguchren had stopped him. The cold mage was leaning slightly forward, frowning, his face masklike in the strange light, his eyes opaque and white as the ice of a deep northern winter. He was holding Kairaithin back; that, too, was obvious.

  But Tehre saw several less obvious things as well. She saw that, though Beguchren was battling the griffin mage, his attention was really elsewhere. His strange icy eyes hardly turned toward the griffin; he was searching instead through the roiling, dust-laden sky for something else. Or someone else. A different griffin? Tehre guessed. Another griffin mage? Or something else?

  And Lord Bertaud also seemed distracted or worried—well, anybody would be worried, yes, but in fact anybody would be terrified, and he did not seem terrified at all. He was not crouching under the violence of the winds, as she was. He was standing, his hands at his sides, his head back, watching Kairaithin. Sometimes he stared up at another griffin as it passed more closely than usual, flashing into view and then disappearing again into the fiery winds; the only time Tehre saw him flinch was at the swift approach of a gleaming white griffin, so pure a white that it might have been carved out of alabaster and then brought to burning life. It slashed all along the hillside, so low the long feathers of its wing tips might have brushed the sand if it had stroked downward. But its wings tilted before it touched the sand, and it angled sharply up and away—actually, feathers must be made of a peculiarly strong and flexible material or they would surely break against the force of the air when any feathered creature turned like that—

  Tehre was recalled to the moment as pillars of twisted rock forced their way abruptly through the sand behind Kairaithin, and to either side; the desert trembled and rumbled as the stone tore its way free from the sand and out into the violent wind, which shrieked and moaned as it was cut by the sharp edges of the rock. She could feel the grinding movement of those contorted pillars where she sat—no, she realized: She could feel the movement of the pillars that were rising behind them. The griffin mage was building a circle of twisted pillars to enclose them all. That could not be good. She stared at Gereint for an instant; he seemed no better. Beguchren did not seem able to keep Kairaithin from making the pillars. Tehre got unsteadily to her feet and made her way over to Bertaud’s side, catching his arm to steady herself as the ground shook again.

  “Do you understand this?” she asked him when he glanced distractedly down at her. She had to half shout to be heard over the battling winds and grinding stone. “You—in Feierabiand—did you—did they—”

  The foreigner put an arm around her to steady her as the ground shuddered. He shook his head. “Nothing like this happened in Feierabiand! Not that I saw! Kairaithin killed a lot of cold mages, he said, but I didn’t see it!”

  “Beguchren was always the strongest of our cold mages!” Tehre peered through the veiling sand and dust that obscured the desert. “I don’t understand what he’s doing—I don’t understand what he did to Gereint—it looks like he’s battling Kairaithin, but I’d take oath half his attention’s on something else, only I don’t know what!”

  “He’s searching for Kes,” Bertaud said, grimly, but almost too low for her to make out his words. “He’s searching for Kes!” he repeated, when she shook her head. “A girl—one of ours—he made her into a fire mage, a fire-healer; she’s why the griffins don’t have to fear ten thousand soldiers—if your king had sent so many, and I saw only a few hundred down there, I think!”

  The griffins had made a human girl into a fire mage? Tehre stared at Bertaud, but he seemed perfectly serious.

  The desert cracked open at their feet, knife-edged stone ripping free of the sand to slice the dust-laden wind into shrieking ribbons; both Tehre and Lord Bertaud staggered backward. Tehre would have fallen except Bertaud caught her, and then he slipped and might have fallen himself except she braced her whole strength to support him, and with one accord they flung themselves, stumbling, toward Beguchren. They knelt down there in the relative calm behind the cold mage, beside Gereint, where the ground was steadier and where they might be protected from the worst of the violent winds. The mage did not pay them any heed—neither, more disturbingly, did Gereint.

  She asked Bertaud, “He made her into a fire mage? A human girl? He made a creature of earth into a creature of fire? Didn’t it hurt her terribly? Didn’t she mind?”

  Bertaud, hunkering down to one knee between Tehre and the scattered sparks that came down the wind, shook his head. “Not after it was done, I believe. You have to understand… once you’re a creature of fire, once you understand fire and take it into your heart, the country of fire is very beautiful.”

  She supposed that might even be true, though at the moment the desert seemed anything but beautiful—fierce, worse than fierce—savage, even murderous. But if you were a creature of fire, she supposed it might seem different.

  “Your Beguchren is trying to find Kes, I think,” Bertaud said, while Tehre was still trying to understand how a human woman might be made into a creature of fire. “He wants to kill her, I suppose! He might want to kill Kairaithin, but that isn’t important—but it would change everything, if the griffins didn’t have Kes—if they didn’t have her, I expect your king would send ten thousand soldiers to destroy them all—he’d want to destroy the country of fire entirely and reclaim not only Melentser for his own, but all the northern desert—he’s ambitious, is the Arobern—”

  Tehre supposed this was true. At the moment, destroying all the griffins and reclaiming this burning desert for earth seemed a fine idea to her, but Lord Bertaud sounded terribly grim. His face had gone tight and hard, and the expression in his eyes was bleak. He said something else, too low for Tehre to understand. Then he glanced at her and said more clearly, “Everything depends on your Beguchren’s strength, and Kairaithin’s—Kairaithin told me once that in the desert, he was stronger than Beguchren—”

  “Oh,” Tehre said, surprised. Pieces of a puzzle she’d barely glimpsed in outline fell suddenly into place. She said with conviction, “Beguchren’s made Gereint into a mage, and now he’s using Gereint’s strength to support his own. Gereint would have had plenty of strength to give, I expect—”

  Bertaud was shaking his head. “Wait, wait, he did what?”

  “As Kairaithin made your Feierabianden girl into a fire mage,” Tehre said patiently, surprised he hadn’t grasped this at once. “It’s not quite the same thing—in fact, it should be much easier. I wonder if it takes a maker who’s already got a little magecraft woven through his gift? Or if any maker can be made into a mage? I wonder if I…” She stopped. It was a disquieting idea.

  Another griffin came slanting out of the fire-streaked wind and landed neatly on the sand by Kairaithin, and another after that. The first was large, not as massive as Kairaithin, but heavy and muscular: a powerful griffin with golden eyes and bronze feathers; the feathers of his wings were bronze streaked with copper and gold and his lion rear a dark bronze gold. The second, smaller, griffin was a rich gold-stippled brown.

  On the back of the smaller griffin perched a human girl, only even wit
hout Bertaud’s explanation, Tehre would never have mistaken her for anything human. She was fine boned, small, pretty—but she looked even less human than Kairaithin had when he’d taken human form. She seemed spun out of white gold and fire; her eyes were filled with fire; bright little tongues of fire flickered in her pale hair and ran down her bare arms. She was smiling, a dangerous expression that was also somehow joyous. She slipped down from the brown griffin’s back to stand between it and Kairaithin, but she left a hand buried in the feathers of its neck.

  Beguchren, frowning, took one step forward. Ice rimed his white eyes and his hands; ice glittered on the sand where he’d set his feet and sparkled in the air around him; near him, the dark of the desert night was lit by a pearly light that sparkled with frost. He took another step.

  Kairaithin folded his heavy black wings, a gesture that somehow seemed contemptuous, and tilted his head downward so that his savage beak pointed at the burning sand under his feet. The other griffins swayed forward, their wings still half spread; the bronze one snaked its head out low and hissed. Kes tossed her head, dropped her hand away from the brown griffin’s neck, and stood straight, smiling.

  Behind them and to either side, a net of fire spun itself between one stone pillar and the next, and the next, and the next after that: a tight-woven web of fire wound itself around the griffin mages and Beguchren, and around Tehre and Bertaud where they knelt beside Gereint. All around the circle flames sprang up, burning tall and smokeless, white and gold and blood crimson, columns and sheets of fire that towered straight up toward the sky in a sudden, shocking absence of wind.

  Beguchren took one more step forward, and a broad, nebulous bolt of mist and frost speared out toward—not Kairaithin, Bertaud had been right—toward Kes.

  The girl did not move. But she did not need to. The attack never touched her. Fire rose up and swallowed the cold mist and absorbed it, and then burned higher, reaching out to engulf Kes entirely. Any normal human girl would have burned alive in that fire. Kes stood amid the flames, her smile never faltering, her body blurring into fire and then reshaping itself out of fire once more.