Several mounts whuffed; others whuffed; and low murmurs rose in the darkness.
Anna guided Farinelli back toward Liende. “How are you and the players doing?”
“We will be ready when summoned, lady.”
“Thank you.” Anna eased the gelding back up beside Kinor.
Shortly, Hanfor reappeared. “All is set. We go forward.” He stood in the stirrups. “Douse the torches. Now.”
In the darkness, Anna felt even more alone as she and Hanfor led the smaller group of lancers away from the supporting troops—along the road to the east. Were there fires or lights ahead to her left?
“We have but a half-dek before you begin,” Hanfor whispered. “His sentries are four hundred yards to the east of the picket posts.”
“So … it’s more than a dek from here to his camp?”
“I would guess so.”
Anna turned in her saddle. “Liende, we’ll need to do the short flame song here, and then the players will have to remount and ride about a half dek before we do the main spells. The sentries are too far out for us to use the long spells effectively on the Prophet.”
“We stand ready.”
Anna wanted to sigh. She could understand Liende’s reluctance, but without large armies and trained armsmen and lancers, what was a regent supposed to do?
“The short flame song, as soon as you can,” she told the chief player. Then she dismounted gingerly in the bare illumination afforded by the bright stars—and Darksong—and handed Farinelli’s reins to Kinor.
“Players into position,” whispered Liende from behind Anna.
Standing on the road, on a clay that felt damp and a little slick, the sorceress squared her shoulders and took several deep breaths as the players arranged themselves.
Anna cocked her head. Were those voices?
“ … hear something out there?”
“ … swear there was a torch out there … gone …”
“ … who’d be out this time of night … ?”
“Now!” hissed Anna.
“The short flame song. On my mark. Mark!” ordered Liende.
The first bar was awful, but Anna had always insisted on having three bars as a standard before the song part of the spell began, and that foresight once again proved helpful, since, by the time she began the spell proper, the players were together.
Silence in death, silence in fear,
the sentries who watch for us to near … .
A dozen blue-white spears of flame flashed across the sky, even before Anna’s last words. She didn’t wait to see if the effect was as she’d hoped. Either way, they needed to ride forward to enable her to use sorcery.
“Mount up,” Anna ordered, taking Farinelli’s reins and climbing into the saddle, urging the gelding onward.
“Forward!” Hanfor’s command conveyed urgency despite the low voice in which he had issued it.
The Regent couldn’t even tell exactly when they passed where the picket posts or the sentries had been beyond that, except that she could sense … something … looming ahead. The feel of so many armsmen? The presence of Darksong sorcery?
“See … there are the low cookfires—the red glow,” said Kinor from beside Anna.
She almost started in her saddle; in the darkness and her self-absorption, she’d forgotten that the young man had been riding beside her. She thought she saw figures moving before the campfires, although they were still a good quarter dek away.
“We need to hurry,” Anna told Liende and Hanfor as she swung out of the saddle. She still had to hold on to the saddle rim for a moment to steady herself in the gloom. Handing Farinelli’s reins to Kinor and stepping forward, she cleared her throat once, and then again.
Behind her, as each player dismounted, a lancer eased up and took the reins of that player’s mount.
“Players into position,” whispered Liende. “One note … tune … now!”
The single note wavered into the darkness, then strengthened.
“The long flame song, as soon as you can,” ordered Anna.
“The long flame song, on my mark.” Liende’s dim figure moved closer to Anna. “When you are ready, Regent.”
Anna cleared her throat, facing toward the dull mound that was the hill where Rabyn’s camp lay. “Now.”
“On my mark … mark!”
Anna concentrated on the music and called up the words.
Turn to fire, turn to flame
all Nesereans who revere Rabyn’s name,
turn to ashes, turn to dust …
… bring down the Prophet with that flame,
So none will e’er recall his name.
The sorceress found herself breathing heavily after the last notes died away. For a long moment, the night was hushed, totally silent.
The faintest shimmer of redness flowed from the star-speckled skies. Then the unseen chords of harmony vibrated through the cool air, chords felt only by a handful of people, Anna knew—mostly the players and those sensitive to sorcery.
Another timeless instant of silence followed.
Abruptly, a single set of drumbeats echoed into the night, just as arrows of white-hot flame cascaded from high overhead, down across the Neserean campsite, but near Rabyn’s tent the arrows veered into a pyramid—leaving the tent and the drums untouched.
“Bowmen, stand ready with shafts!” ordered Hanfor.
“He’s got his own sorcery,” Kinor said.
Great! Anna tried to think. What could counter that Darksong sorcery?
The arrows of flame continued to fall across the upper part of the Neserean camp, and the invisible pyramid was illuminated in flame, but those flames fell away from the tent, whose blue and cream panels were revealed by the flow of flames.
The thunder of a single drum continued to boom into the darkness. A second, deeper tone, joined the first, then a third, and the darkness flashed with sparks of light, as glowing black shieldlike globules rose from the Prophet’s tent. Each shield smothered an arrow of flame, and both dark and light points of sorcery vanished, casting an eerie flickering of dark and light across the open space and the trees, erratically illuminating the hill behind the camp.
Yells and screams rose from the camps, and some of those screams were not from men, but from their mounts. Anna winced.
From the south, farther from the sorceress, Anna could hear orders being shouted. Before long, the Mansuurans would be ready to counterattack.
Waves of pressure, like sounds that had taken on the force of a slow-moving wind, began to press at her. Her ears felt as though she were far, far underwater, slowly being crushed. She could feel something like static electricity crawling along her arms.
You’ve got to come up with another spell—quickly. But what? Rabyn’s triple-toned Darksong was blocking her flame arrows, and the darkness was creeping away from the tent toward her, with the increasingly stronger rhythm and volume of the Darksong drums.
Think! You’ve got to do something.
Anna shook her head against the pressure that enfolded her, that slowed her thoughts. She had a plan. She had spells. What are they? Where are they?
Her head throbbed, and her eyes blurred.
88
NORTH OF FUSSEN, DEFALK
A single unheard note wakes Rabyn, and he stumbles from his silk coverlet onto the smooth wool of the carpet that covers the ground. It is not dawn, and the cookfires should still be low coals for glasses yet, but he can sense an unseen chord nearing the tent, like a slow arrow frozen within the scope of a fraction of a glass.
He stiffens, then yanks on trousers alone and hastens to the front of the tent Outside, the night remains dark. Rabyn shakes his head and steps out and around a lone Prophet’s Guard.
“Sire?”
“Shut up!” His eyes traverse the darkness. A torch? Something? “Nubara! Get the drummers!” Rabyn runs barefooted toward the drums behind the tent. “Fools! You’re all fools.” He reaches the first of the man-high massive drums
and pulls off the oiled cloth protecting it. “‘She won’t attack so soon, honored Prophet’ … fools!”
Nubara appears with his cloak wrapped over his bare chest as Rabyn yanks the oiled cloths off the second drum, and then the third. “Rabyn! What are you doing? Why—” A racking cough chokes off the remainder of his hoarse-shouted question.
“The bitch sorceress! You fools! You’re all fools!” The young Prophet turns to the bare-chested and black-haired youth barely older than the Prophet himself and thrusts the carved wooden mallets into the drummer’s hands. “The first rhythm! Now!”
Rabyn takes the second set of mallets in his own hand and climbs onto the high stool by the second drum. “Follow me!”
The first uneven rumbling rhythm rolls slowly into the darkness, creating an initial cacophony that quickly smooths into a more even flow, just as a pattering or hissing that calls up rain rains down from above the tent, but the air is cool and dry, not damp.
Rabyn does not look up from where he mans the second drum as flashes of fire flicker against the alternating blue and cream silk panels of the tent.
Nubara is frozen in place beside the tent and looks skyward, incredulous at what he sees in what should have been darkness overhead. Hissing lines of fire drop out of the sky, all across the camp of the Prophet. Like a sleepwalker moving to the beat of the drums, Nubara edges along the side of the tent.
The area around the drums seems like dawn or dusk, lit by fires falling from the sky, but veering away from the tent area. Beyond the tent, screams have begun to fill the camp area, its expanse a mixture of light and shadow created by the arrowlike flames that descend from the dark heavens.
Amid the flashes of light, darkness has begun to flare as well as fire, dark bolts of sound, not quite dissonance nor yet harmony, rising from the drums with each blow of the mallets. For several moments, the drumbeats merely create a low thunder, but that mounts to a rumbling greater than the volume of the drums themselves and continues to build into a deafening roar. Overhead, the flame arrows flicker, seem to dim, and there are fewer that flare across the night sky.
“How … did … she get so close?” gasps Nubara.
Rabyn ignores the question, handing the mallets he has wielded to the last drummer to appear. “Keep it up! Rhythm the first!”
Then the slender Prophet stands before the drums, facing eastward, and begins to hum, trying to find a note or pitch suited to employing the triple-toned drums whose rumbling beat has begun to shake the ground and vibrate the skulls of all within hearing distance. His clear if thin tenor rises over the shivering beats of the massive drums.
Find, find, find where her sorceries abound.
Break, break, break the harmony of sound … .
Blue fire creeps from the ground, from everywhere, and clothes the Prophet of Music as he melds his voice into the driving rhythm of the triple drums. Slender as he is, Rabyn appears taller, more solid, than the massive drum behind him, and darkness wells out from his chanting singing figure.
Clutching one of the exterior poles supporting the tent, Nubara looks at the shining figure of the young Prophet, cloaked in a shimmering nimbus of flickering blue, then at the three drummers, also shimmering in blue, if less intensely. Slowly, the Mansuuran officer draws the unadorned iron blade from his belt. He takes one step toward Rabyn, then pauses, trying to catch his breath. He takes a second step, then a third.
Nubara stands less than a yard from the Prophet, gasping, slowly raising the cold iron knife. He lurches forward, like a bent old man, but his grip on the knife is firm, even as his steps are not, and he thrusts the blade toward the darksinger.
Half-turning, as if warned, the shorter Rabyn lashes out with an arm cloaked in blue flame, flame that wraps around Nubara’s arm. Nubara falls, toppling forward in those blue flames, a self-consuming pillar of blue fire that flares skyward, then subsides into glittering dust that flames for a time.
That intrusion is enough for Rabyn to momentarily lose his concentration, for his voice to falter over a mere handful of notes. And though his voice falters and for but an instant falls behind the rhythm of the triple drums, in that instant, the web of darkness that has protected the tent and drums shreds under the assault of golden arrows from the heavens.
Rabyn’s eyes widen as the flames cascade down around him.
A dull thud announces that one of the drummers has fallen across his drum.
More arrows flash downward, and these bear heavy iron shafts, iron that glows and sings as it falls from the darkness.
One slashes through Rabyn’s shoulder, and a second through his neck—and yet another pierces his chest.
“ … bitch …” His words gurgle to a halt in the rain of fire.
Beneath his twitching body, the ground groans, and shudders, and the clashing chords of Darksong and Clearsong rip even through the ears of those who have never heard the sounds of dissonance and harmony.
89
Anna stood in the alternating waves of light and darkness, trying to recall what she was supposed to do next. Unseen dark waves of sound—with the feel of something dank and evil—pawed at her as she stood motionless. Behind her, her players were equally frozen.
What can you do when his sorcery blocks your flame arrows? The question pounded through her head.
Her sorcerous arrows were only flame arrows. Perhaps the weight of real iron-headed arrows, boosted by sorcery, would be enough.
“The arrow song! The arrow song. Hanfor! Now! Have them loose the arrows, all they can!”
She could direct that sorcery and the arrows at the drums themselves. Then … she’d need another spell … but that would have to wait. The drums … she had to destroy them, first. “Liende, the arrow spell!”
“The arrow song! On my mark … Mark!” called Liende, her voice strong, if slower than usual.
The players’ first notes were shaky, but better than with the first spell, and melded together almost seamlessly within a bar. As before when she had faced the drums, Anna felt beaten down, depressed, and as though she were crawling out of a hole, and each word of the spell was forced. She kept her focus on the spell, just on the spell.
“Loose shafts! Toward the fires! Loose shafts, now!” ordered Hanfor, his voice carrying now that the element of surprise was gone.
As she began to sing, Anna concentrated on the image of the heavy arrowheads bursting through whatever barrier Rabyn had laid, and smashing through the drumskins, the iron glowing with glistening light, searing through the darkness.
Heads of arrows, shot into the air,
strike the drumskins, straight through there,
rend the drums and those who play …
for their spells and Darksong pay!
Anna held her breath, watching, then coughed, and tried to clear her throat, her eyes still on those lines of glowing red iron as the arrows climbed and then arched over the fires toward the tent of the Prophet and the heavy beating of the Darksong drums.
Eiiistttt!
Like they had become sparklers, each shaft began to sizzle with light as it neared the Prophet’s tent. The first shafts, like the earlier flame arrows, winked out, but suddenly more than a handful seemed to accelerate.
A brilliant line of blue fire erupted from the Neserean camp, outlining in detail the alternating blue and cream panels of a large pavilion tent.
As the blue fire died, the heavy shafts loosed by the bowmen took on a brighter and more golden glow, then a sunlight incandescence as they dropped toward the drums and the tent of the Prophet.
Got to get Rabyn … can’t let him do another spell like the last ones.
“More arrows! More arrows … the arrow spell again … !” Anna shouted.
She swallowed, then timed her entry to the spellsong, and directed her voice westward, toward the again dark tent and the Prophet who had to be there.
These arrows shot into the air,
the head of each must strike Lord Rabyn there—
&nbs
p; The sorceress could hear the thrum of bowstrings and sense the release of the arrows.
—with force and speed to kill him dead,
for all the treachery he’s done and led.
She staggered for a moment at the end of the spell, trying to catch her breath.
One more set of fire lines arched across the Neserean camp, and the lowest-pitched drum fell silent, then the others. The lower camp—that of the Mansuurans—continued to bustle with mounts and men.
While the light breeze continued out of the north, Anna could still smell a hint of charred flesh, and her stomach turned.
“Now what, Lady Anna?” asked Hanfor.
The sorceress swallowed. “We ride back to where the rest of the lancers are, and we get ready, if we have to, to wipe out the Mansuurans, if they decide to attack. That will give the players a little time to rest.” She turned in the darkness that had again fallen across the road and the hillside. “Chief Player?”
“Yes, Regent.”
“Have the players mount up. We’ll rejoin the rest of the lancers. Once we get there, though, have everyone ready to play the long flame song. That’s just in case.” Anna rubbed her forehead, trying to massage away the pain in her eyes, ignoring the throbbing in the back of her skull.
“We will be ready.” After a pause, Liende called out. “You heard the Regent. Pack your instruments and mount up.”
“Green company! To the fore!” Hanfor’s voice rode through the darkness.
After mounting, Anna took the water bottle Kinor extended, swallowing half of what was in it before turning Farinelli away from the still-burning Neserean camp.
“ … form a rear guard here until the Regent and the players are well away. Then you follow slowly, and rejoin us and the rest of the force … .”
Anna nodded at the sense of Hanfor’s orders. He was always crisp and clear. She felt she muddled through everything.
Darksong Rising: The Third Book of the Spellsong Cycle Page 42