Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  “They’re all mages,” Bertaud said quietly, to himself as much as to Tehre. “Kairaithin’s brought some of his young students into their power—including Kes. I don’t think your Beguchren can match them, however much power he’s taken from your friend.”

  Tehre shook her head, wanting to deny this, but actually she thought he was right. The frost surrounding Beguchren had closed in around him, and she doubted the mage was contracting his power of his own accord. His face was taut and strained. He bowed his head and lifted his hands, but the spear of ice he shaped out of his need flung itself only halfway toward the human fire mage before the fierce heat of the surrounding fire trapped it and it dissolved back into the air.

  Beguchren made a low sound, lifting his head again. In his frost-white eyes was frustration and anger and the terrible knowledge of failure, and Tehre found herself holding her breath in sympathy—she leaped to her feet and ran to him, in her mind a confused idea of telling him to make her into a mage, to use her power, she was ready to argue, I have more strength than you’d think. Use it. Use me. But the thought came too late and she had no chance to make the offer: Even as she reached Beguchren, his eyes rolled back and he folded slowly to his knees and then to the sand. She caught him, went down with him, supported his head on her knee, setting her hand against his face as she tried to determine whether he’d actually died or only collapsed—he was cold, cold as ice to the touch, but she found a weak pulse beating against the fine skin of his throat.

  But she already knew it didn’t matter: If the mage still lived, he wouldn’t for long. She could feel the ferocity of the surrounding desert without even looking up.

  Then she looked up.

  The fire woven between the stones had begun to die—or, not die, but ebb slowly back into the sand and the wind. The stone pillars stood like plinths of hot emptiness against the sky; far above, an unseen griffin cried out, a high, wild shriek, fierce and exultant. The sound sent icy prickles down Tehre’s spine. Kairaithin and his companions, lit by their own fire, were still visible, and that was worse than the unseen griffins in the air above.

  Kes was laughing, delight in her eyes, in her face. She said to Kairaithin in a light, fierce voice that was nothing like the voice of a human woman, “This was a night for victory and the living fire!”

  And we shall finish the victory, lest we dishonor the night that has given it to us, agreed the griffin mage, his voice slicing not quite painfully around the edges of Tehre’s mind.

  Kes shook off fire as an ordinary woman might shake drops of water off her hands. Then she flung herself onto the back of the brown griffin, which dipped its wings to make room for her to mount. The griffin was laughing too, not aloud, but joy blazed from every line of its slender body. It hurled itself aloft, the girl bending low over its neck, and the fiery wind blazed around them both, the darkness opening to let them through.

  The bronze griffin said to Kairaithin, its voice terrifyingly eager, Shall we end this? It swayed forward a step, its wings flaring, the rising wind hissing through the feathers with a deadly sound. Tehre thought it might simply bite Beguchren’s head off and she crouched defensively down over the mage. Though probably that would simply prompt the griffin to bite her head off instead…

  “No,” said Lord Bertaud. He stood up, walked quietly to stand beside Tehre, dropped a hand to touch her shoulder. But he did not look at her. He was looking only at Kairaithin. He said flatly, as though he really thought the griffin would care what he said, “It’s not acceptable to Feierabiand that Casmantium be destroyed.”

  Is it acceptable to you that the country of fire be destroyed? asked the griffin mage, his voice terrible with contained anger. Is it acceptable to you that the People of Fire and Air be destroyed?

  “No,” said Bertaud. “Find another way.”

  Kairaithin’s wings flared; he flung his head up, his terrible beak snapping shut with a horrifying, deadly sound. If there is no other way?

  “There must be,” Lord Bertaud insisted, but to Tehre he looked grim and ill, as though he thought maybe there was not.

  The griffin mage caught fire from the wind, drew fire from the sand, sent fire running in a thin loop around the circle of pillars. He was going to kill them all, Tehre thought; whatever alliance existed between the griffins and Feierabiand, he was going to burn them all to ash, she and Lord Bertaud and Gereint, and below them all those men with their useless spears, and then the griffins were going to ruin the rivers on which all of southern Casmantium depended and laugh as the country of earth withered… She said, “No,” and stood up, lowering Beguchren gently to the sand. Everyone was staring at her, but she barely noticed. All her attention was on Gereint, who was unchanged, tucked down against the sand, not quite unconscious, but certainly not aware. Alone of them all, he had noticed neither battle nor defeat and was now innocent of their imminent death.

  His strength had been taken by Beguchren. But he hadn’t been injured. He was only weak. If he regained his strength, he’d be a mage, probably. Untrained, of course. That hadn’t mattered to Beguchren. The king’s mage might even have found it an advantage. It wouldn’t be an advantage now. But still… Tehre knelt beside Gereint, laid a hand on his shoulder, and spun off some of her own strength, feeding it to him as a healer might support an injured man. She’d watched her mother do this, and although she’d never done it before herself, it seemed easy enough. She had told Beguchren the truth: She was stronger than she looked; she could draw strength from her gift, plenty to spare.

  Under her hand, Gereint’s shoulder tensed. His head came up. Awareness came into his eyes. He looked first up into her face. He was pleased to see her: that, first. Then surprised. Then frightened, as memory and thought came back to him. He looked past her, then to Lord Bertaud, whom he did not know. He dismissed him, looked farther. Saw Beguchren, lying abandoned and insensible on the sand. The fear was replaced by anger, and then, as he turned his attention instead toward Kairaithin and the other griffin, by grim revulsion. Tehre stared at him. She had understood the surprise, the fear, the anger. But the depth of loathing she saw in Gereint’s eyes astonished her. Or, no. Hadn’t somebody… probably Andreikan Warichteier… said something about a violent antipathy between mages of earth and mages of fire? And Gereint was a mage now.

  Not taking his eyes off of Kairaithin, he got to his feet, and Tehre jumped up and backed away, suddenly not certain whom, or what, she’d woken from an exhausted stupor and brought back into the desert night.

  CHAPTER 14

  Gereint was aware first only of Tehre’s presence, which for an instant seemed ordinary, expected, part of the natural order of the world. Then he remembered that he’d left her in Breidechboden, and although he didn’t yet recall where he was now, he knew it wasn’t the capital. So then he wondered, How she had come to this place? Puzzled, he looked past her. But he did not understand at once what he saw: a man he did not recognize, and a hillside that fell away into the darkness; sand and fire; pillars of twisted stone standing black against the dark sky—inimical fire linking one pillar to the next in a thin circle; crushing heat rising from the sand underfoot and pressing down from above. He remembered the desert at last, and looked for Beguchren. Found him: collapsed and unconscious. He was immediately angry: why had no one helped the mage? Couldn’t they see he needed attention, care? He began to push himself up.

  Then he finally saw the griffins, and the anger he’d felt on Beguchren’s behalf flared into a cold white fury laced with loathing. Memory crashed back with an almost physical shock, and he found himself on his feet, glaring toward the creatures, outraged by their very existence. If he’d known how to attack them, he would have done it then. Though, an instant later, it occurred to him that Beguchren had known how to fight them and he was lying helpless on the sand. And if the king’s own mage had been defeated, what chance did an ignorant, untrained new-made mage have in any battle? He hesitated, caught between furious antipathy and an awareness of his own
helplessness.

  Then Tehre caught his hand.

  Startled out of his anger, Gereint stared down at her. She was tiny, covered with red dust, her hair singed and her hands blistered from the fire that scattered from the wind. Her mouth was set in determination, her eyes snapping with forceful thought. She did not seem frightened at all. She looked exactly as she always did when absorbed by a difficult problem: intense and absorbed and distracted. She said quickly, “Either the griffins will destroy Casmantium, or we’ll destroy them, and we don’t have the strength to stop them, but there’s another way, there really is—as long as you’ll help me, are you a maker at all, anymore?”

  “I—” began Gereint. He meant to say, I’m a stranger to myself. I don’t know what I am. Only Tehre did not wait for him to say anything at all.

  She put her other hand on Gereint’s arm, whether to steady herself or to somehow balance her gift against his unskilled mage power or to take back some of the strength she’d given him or even to give him more of her strength; he couldn’t tell.

  But what happened was nothing he’d thought of. Instead, the pillars nearest at hand shattered. Shards of knife-edged stone whirled into the night. Then the farther pillars broke, and the ones after that, all around the circle. Tiny fragments flew like arrows, large pieces fell to the sand with massive, dull impacts. The fire between them died; the griffins were gone—no, the smaller one was gone; the massive black one had merely shifted back a short way. It called up a fiery wind; the desert trembled; stone shifted underfoot.

  “I’ll break the desert itself,” Tehre warned breathlessly. “I’ll make a crack right across this hillside, a crack that goes down so far the molten fire under the sand drains down into the darkness under the mountains. I can do it. I can do it, so back away! Get your people away! Gereint, the mountains, I can feel them looming over there, all that stone; raw stone is just waiting to be shaped into masonry, don’t the stonecarvers say that?”

  That was all the warning she gave him before she broke the mountains.

  It should have been impossible. It was certainly a feat beyond any maker Gereint had ever heard of, yet completely unrelated to anything he could imagine doing with magecraft. But Tehre had certainly done it somehow. Though the mountains were far away and invisible in the darkness, he heard them go: the three on the right and the two on the left, and maybe others more distant still; a heavy grinding roar so immense it went beyond any measurement of sound and became a physical presence in the night. It went on and on, fathomless: a huge booming roar of stone falling, pounding against more stone, grinding inexorably downhill.

  “Help me make a wall,” Tehre ordered breathlessly, standing on her toes to shout into Gereint’s ear. “They’re falling, but they’re not falling right, I can tell, the pieces are scattering all down the hillsides, they need to be a wall—”

  No, it wasn’t a wall she had made, not yet. It was an avalanche, and it was huge. Gereint tried to use his maker’s sense of materials to track what Tehre had done, but he couldn’t. He reached after his gift for making, after the familiar awareness of materials that waited to be shaped, but that awareness was gone; there was nothing left. The loss was like the loss of a hand, of his eyes, but in place of the maker’s awareness was something else, a more direct awareness of power and force and strength, an awareness of movement and the chance that something would go one way and not another.

  Not just the near mountains, Gereint thought. Tehre had pulled down half the mountain range, by the sound and the feel of it. She had broken free the granite at the heart of the mountains and called the stone down from the heights toward the dry track of the great river—toward them all. He shouted back to Tehre, over the roar of approaching stone, “You should have warned me—”

  “How long do you think I should have waited?” Tehre had closed her eyes, letting her maker’s awareness guide her. She said urgently, her eyes still closed, “I can break the pieces into blocks as they come, but I can’t get the blocks to fall where they need to go. There’re too many and they’re too heavy and coming too fast—”

  Everything was too heavy and coming too fast. Gereint shut his eyes and tried to think about being a pivot in the world, a point of focus where forces balanced. It was surprisingly easy to think of himself that way. He could feel the grounded power of the hundreds of men below the hill, surprisingly steady, like springs of water welling up through the sand. He could feel the deep strength of earth and stone, behind or beyond the quick, foreign balance of fire; it underlay the new desert and rose, he thought, somehow through the men.

  And beyond desert and fire and men and earth, he perceived the rushing stone and earth of the avalanche. He felt the shattered, thundering stone as a gathering rush of power—not a maker’s sense at all, not something he could touch or hold, not something that spoke to him of potential shape and form, but something.

  Something suddenly caught up all the strength of earth Gereint could perceive, power right at the edge of his perception, stripped that power out of the men who had dared the desert, and through them pulled strength right out of the earth beneath the fiery sands and set it loose in an unfocused whirlwind.

  Gereint, stunned, nevertheless caught up the freed power and bent its path. He let it slam through the world not as it wished to run, a wild and uncontrolled outflow across all the hills, but channeled into a narrow strip—was dimly aware of another focal point in the world that balanced against his, that supported him—the avalanche tore its way through the desert sand and piled itself up all along the western shore of the dry river, stretching north to south and then bending away to the west in a wide strip of… blocks, he realized at last. Not raw stone mixed with gravel and dirt and desert sand, but huge rough-edged granite blocks that Tehre had shaped out of the mountains, without chisel or mallet or the thousand years of labor it should have taken her. He opened his eyes, looking for her.

  Tehre was sitting now at his feet, near the limp shape of Beguchren. She had one hand on the fallen mage’s shoulder, but her head was bowed over her drawn-up knees and her eyes were closed. She was not looking at Beguchren, Gereint knew. She was watching the cracking stone with her inward maker’s eyes, encouraging it to break along the lines she wanted, with something greater than the skill of any ordinary builder or engineer. Coaxing the blocks to fall into position even far to the west, supported by the enormous power Gereint had caught and made, in turn, available for her.

  Gereint glanced over at the stranger, who was standing, oddly, beside the black griffin mage. Down by the dry river, he could dimly make out Amnachudran’s company—not with his eyes, he realized eventually, but with some new strange sense. He thought the men still lived… He was not certain. The griffins had not destroyed them. The dimness was a function of what he had done himself, was still doing. He thought they had not died when magecraft had suddenly seized on their strength and through them on the strength of the earth. But he was not certain.

  The griffins were gone out of the wind, out of sight… He was aware of them, a tug against his attention, flame-edged monsters with no proper shape, pulling the natural strength of earth in thoroughly unnatural directions… but high, distant, not at the moment dangerous. Save for the griffin mage. He stared that way, torn, hesitating to go down toward the wall Tehre was building because he did not want to have the griffin at his back, knowing he did not have the skill or experience to do proper battle—

  “Go on,” shouted the stranger over the gradually lessening crash and rumble and roar of the avalanche. “Go! Kairaithin won’t fight you!” His Prechen was fluent, not exactly accented, but with a foreign touch to it: He was Feierabianden, Gereint realized, and guessed that he might actually be able to speak for the griffin—and he had come with Tehre, and she had not seemed to think of him as an enemy. And now he said the griffin mage would not fight? If he had the strength and training and the time to fight the griffin, Gereint would never have trusted that assurance. But he could feel the wall
still crashing into place far to the west, and there was no time.

  He took a step down toward the riverbed, paused impatiently, and moved himself through a fold of space to stand beside the great wall. Above him and all along the wall, he could feel blocks break free, roll and crash down from the stony heights, pirouette, and slam into their proper positions. That was Tehre’s task.

  But a deep steady vein of magecraft ran through him now, and he had a task of his own. He laid his hand against the rough face of the wall and made it heavily itself, made the block of stone more thoroughly stone, anchored it solidly to the rock that underlay the new desert and to the blocks that surrounded it. There was no moisture in the air. But the griffins’ desert was too new to have burned the memory of water out of the land. The river at his back, dry as it was, remembered water, remembered the rushing, unpredictable force of the spring flood and the slow, deep, easy wash of the summer. He let that memory bend around him, flow from memory into the moment, laid the memory of water and ice into the stone under his hands and between that block and the next and the next. He turned, trailing the tips of his fingers across the stone, walked slowly upriver, setting the memory of living water and the solidity of the earth deeply into the wall as he walked.

  He did not know how long he walked. He was not only walking but letting himself blur through distance, moving higher and higher into the mountains, the dry Teschanken to his right and the wall to his left. He became aware, gradually, of a presence paralleling his path on the other side of the wall. It was a fiery presence, powerful… It laid fire and the memory of fire into the wall on its other side. Gereint’s first impulse was to fight that foreign magecrafting, but… the memory and training of a maker could not help but understand the balance and symmetry implicit in that working. Earth and water on this side of the wall, fire on that; it would be, he thought, a wall that would forever lock the country of fire away from the country of earth.