Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  I hated myself for yet another lie and took up my stance. At the end of an excruciating practice, and since Birdy didn’t believe me anyway (I thought irritably) I decided I might as well stay in my tower until my eyes cleared.

  I set myself the task of finishing the translation of Adamas Dei’s text, which I knew would help me replace the wards that much more easily. There were few pages left, but this translation—this magic—was more difficult, complex, challenging, than anything I’d done yet. He talked about mirror wards that stepped not only outside of place but outside of time.

  The latter, he said, was the basis for Norsunder.

  When I reached that, I could not halt my experiments, I had to know, to understand. Once again I sensed pieces of a vast puzzle assembling around me, just out of sight. This vague misgiving grew to anxiety as Adamas carefully set out what he’d learned from his tutor—a mysterious figure he never named—about Norsunder’s magic.

  This text was a lesson in how to fight Norsunder’s magic at its fundament.

  While I labored at that text, Kendred vanished back into the Academy. New Year’s approached, arrived, and oaths and judgments went on below as I kept studying.

  With the first clearing of the new year, Ivandred came to see me. I told him that I knew what to do with the those remaining four layers of protective wards. I had assessed the structure clear down to the first, establishing layer. I promised him that after a couple weeks of work it would be finished.

  He gave me his characteristic short nod of approval and walked out. Shortly thereafter he rode out side by side with Haldren Marlovair, the Fox Banner streaming, the deep, mourning bawl of the Venn horn louder than the brassy trumpets pealing chords from the towers.

  I had five pages left to translate. Ivandred was gone, so there was no hurry to complete the ward project. For my own satisfaction, I decided that I would finish the Adamas Dei translation first, and then, to celebrate, I’d attend to the wards. Then I could send the text to the Herskalt along with the news that the wards were finished at long last.

  The morning I finished translating the text, I walked out of my tower in a daze, my feet taking me by habit toward the queen’s suite. When I turned the first corner I was nearly knocked down by Anhar, who righted me and greeted me with a smile. “You’re with us again! What did you find this time?”

  I was so tired that someone else seemed to use my voice. “An old scroll. In my tower library. Been there for centuries.”

  “Of course you had to drop everything and translate it,” Anhar said, laughing. “What scribe, even if she’s become a mage, could resist? But—if you will forgive a trespass—you look as if you could use some exercise.”

  We had arrived at our practice room. Lasva was already there. As I took up my fans I stared down at my feet, blinking. My memory supplied the day of my Fifteen, and my own feet looking like half-furled fans. I swayed with vertigo, as if I was looking in the dyr at my own memories. I had to shut my eyes and breathe.

  Once I began the first move, my body took over, and oh, it felt good to breathe and step and swing. Gradually the world reassembled itself around me. They were talking.

  The word “Chwahir” had caught my attention.

  “… there was never any chance that the Chwahir were going to come over the mountain again, after the Great Flood,” Kaidas was saying, as we stooped, slashed, and snapped our fans.

  “The Great Flood?” Lasva asked.

  They’re talking, I thought. Like the old days, even though Lasva is here. When did that happen? I had not listened with the dyr for days, and the urge to go right then was nearly overwhelming.

  “Spring of 4412,” Kaidas said. “You were not hit by it here?”

  “We had a very, very late winter, and then we went almost straight into summer,” Lasva said. “I threw a Flower Day celebration in the castle because it was still snowing once a week or so. We did hear about some flooding up north. I gather this was widespread?”

  “Down the northern end of the entire continent,” Kaidas said. “That is, the spring storms curled in an enormous spiral over the western mountains, instead of spreading out over the continent. So from Lorgi Idego to the Brennish peninsula there were swollen rivers and floods. When the winds changed that summer, the sky dried up. Chwahirsland went almost overnight from frigid to heat. No rain at all that year. Almost as bad the next, so we ended up renegotiating the treaty. We gained more of their ore, in trade for releasing some of our dams on our side of the mountains and redirecting the flow.”

  “Tell her the rumor,” Birdy said.

  “Which one?” Kaidas laughed as his fan clacked shut then spread, and he twirled around on the balls of his feet. “Queen Hatahra was fluently skeptical about the Sartoran Mage Guild’s insistence that some evil sorcerer had taken up residence in some mysteriously hidden prominence in Ghildraith just to perform evil weather magic.”

  Shock sent my nerves running cold, and I counted back. It couldn’t possibly… no. Relief flooded through me. It was true that my experiments had taken place in those mountains, but they were a vast and mighty range. More than one mage could have been there, and anyway, I’d stopped when winter froze the air around me, late in 4411. The year previous to the one in question.

  “Weather magic?” Lasva asked. “I thought that was forbidden, save in drought conditions, when the mages, at great cost, would do something to cause clouds already present to drop their rain.”

  “It is forbidden,” Kaidas said. “From what we heard at court, the mages don’t like to interfere with a local storm because of the consequences farther on. If we end a drought, say, over Eth Endra, then that can worsen conditions as far away as Sarendan for the next season, or even two.”

  “How is that possible?” Anhar asked. “Emras?”

  I said stiffly, “I have not studied weather magic.” Ignorance is no excuse for the powerful, isn’t that what the Herskalt said?

  “Don’t ask me, either,” Kaidas said. “Hatahra flat refused to believe it. She said that the mages were making up alarmist rumors to explain bad weather in order to hike the fees they charged against governments. All this was before the royal princess produced some book or other from her own magic studies that authenticated the rumor, after which we didn’t hear another word about weather.” He chuckled. “All I can say for certain is the result: that and a pair of fools going after one another with swords is one of the reasons why I am here training fine young colts, and not swanking about court in Alsais, trying not to sit on my sword.”

  Was I the cause of that disaster? I concentrated on my breathing as my body went clammy. Finish the form, I told myself.

  “What I do not comprehend,” Lasva said, “is why anyone would do such a thing? I do not mean the pair of fools, I mean the evil mage. Though I can imagine that my sister inquired closely into the intent of that pair of fools.”

  “Evil has its own purpose,” Kaidas said. “So we’re told. Tip a rock for the fun of seeing an avalanche. No thought to anyone below.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be evil intent,” Birdy said.

  “Surely you do not claim a benign intent?” Lasva responded, her fan flicking upward in mock horror.

  Birdy said in that musing tone that was so familiar, hiding a question beneath. It had been this way when we were young, and he’d gotten a mark for undue influence. “What if there was no intent at all ? What if someone merely thought to experiment? Someone who has, perhaps, slowly shifted from doing what is right for the common good to justifying doing what feels good?”

  He knows. He knows that I was the one.

  Then he said, “Emras, are you all right? You look pale.”

  “You have been sitting too long,” Anhar said. “Would you like me to fetch you some healer’s steep?”

  I opened my eyes to discover the others still working but all looking my way.

  “I am fine,” I said. Again, my voice sounded like someone else’s. I wanted to offer an excuse, as I
always had, but the words dried up.

  Somehow the practice ended, somehow I got away. I stood in the middle of my workroom, shivering as I stared at my desk. My recollection was as clear as always: I had asked the Herskalt about damage to the Marloven crops, and he’d responded that it was an excellent idea, that he’d made me a Destination square in the Ghildraith mountains, where there were always storms. Nothing about further damage.

  Was it possible he did not know? But how could I find out if what Kaidas said was true? I had no books about weather magic. Maybe that was my answer. Because it was forbidden?

  Adamas’s text, the form of magic that I had mastered, the words I’d heard… idle eyes in the Garden of the Twelve.

  Overmastered by need, I shifted to Darchelde, took up the dyr, and faced the wall. Where exactly was this garden? Garden of the Twelve. I shuddered. Now I was just scaring myself. Any garden could be marked off by strong wards.

  Like mirror wards that displaced location. And time?

  I looked around me. The secret room, I already knew, was accessible only by magic. The ward, so complicated-seeming on my first visits, was easily descried now. I could use the Herskalt’s own ward and mirror it from the inside to create my own secret chamber, hidden within his.

  Then I created a magical barrier blocking off that transfer wall between his chamber and the garden. No one was going to come here from that garden, whether it was in Norsunder or not.

  Inside my new secret chamber, I employed the interlocking chain of mirror wards that Adamas Dei had taught me, link by link, layer by layer, until I had made a facsimile of the garden, displaced from the physical world. This was an exhaustive method, but it avoided the burning power of what Adamas Dei called dark magic. The kind I was used to.

  That timeless sense coalesced around me.

  When it was finished, I took the dyr into my lap. I concentrated on Fox, whose voice had become so familiar through his writing. I reached for the day he faced the same Ramis who had told Inda that he was watched by idle eyes in the Garden of the Twelve.

  Even with the mirror wards, the reach so far back in time wrenched my skull from the inside, distorting color and sound, but I didn’t need to hear the words. I’d already read them. All I needed to see was the man with Fox, whose face was marred down one side. Illusory magic. But illusory scarring did not keep me from recognizing the plain brown hair, the still body, the amused hazel gaze of the Herskalt.

  NINE

  OF THE MUTABILITY OF TIME

  M

  y first thought was that it was impossible. Fox had lived more than four hundred years ago. Except that there was no record that he had ever died. Just that he’d sailed away. Beyond time, some insisted. A few of the rumors even placed him in Norsunder.

  And that brought me back to the Herskalt, who had not told me the consequences of weather magic. I could not believe he didn’t know the possible effects. So if he knew, then… My thoughts ran to the Garden, and from there to the Garden of the Twelve, which Ramis had implied was in Norsunder.

  I had my sign of Norsunder at last: the person training me.

  Disbelief was my strongest reaction, followed by question. Why?

  The next reaction was anger. My first impulse was to wrench off the toe ring I’d worn for ten years, toss it, and hand off the problem to Greveas or her superiors. However, I could not do that. First, Sartoran mages had been warded from transfer at the border. It would take weeks, maybe months, for Greveas to arrive the usual way.

  And what would happen to me when she got here? Would I be clapped up somewhere, unable to act, because of my evil deed, however unintentional?

  My neck ached, my eyes burned. I was thirsty. But I had to think this matter through.

  I tried examining my evidence from the perspective of time: my first magic spell, there at that bridge. Anyone could have soaked the wood with oil, but the weather had been so bad that only magic could have spread that fire. And I’d found traces of the Herskalt’s magic there. That was not proof that he’d accelerated that fire, but if he had, why?

  Another of his tests, to see who was strong enough to extinguish those flames by magic? Then came Darchelde and the archive, and again I was tested, and survived. Was the weather magic a test? If so, what was his purpose? A Norsundrian lord, capable of powerful magic, spends all this time helping Ivandred with his political unrest and army training, and trains a scribe to become a mage?

  Something was missing. And maybe I was not capable of seeing it. What had Birdy said? Someone who has, perhaps, slowly shifted from doing what is right for the common good to justifying doing what feels good. Someone who has gently but firmly been guided from moral certainty to casuistry.

  The urge, the need to break the shroud of secrecy and lies was so overwhelming that I raised my hands to transfer right then. But when I tried to stand I staggered, giddy to an astonishing degree. My hand clutched the table as I steadied myself, causing the porcelain bowl to rattle, and I remembered the dyr.

  If the Herskalt was truly a Norsundrian, whatever his purpose, he would need the dyr to listen to us all.

  Second certain thing: he had not been here since my arrival, so he could not have listened to me, which meant he could not know that I had seen him in Fox’s memory.

  I have to take it, I thought, gazing at the dyr. But I remembered what he’d said about transporting it. Whoever he might be, so far he had not lied outright.

  I had not yet replaced those last four layers of wards over Choreid Dhelerei, but I knew the traps and personal wards. Though I did not recognize any of the names, one thing was for certain: no ward against the dyr. Therefore, the ward against transporting it had to be buried somewhere in the Darchelde protections. There were a lot of these. But I could bypass them by placing one of those false walls—a transfer access—similar to the one that opened to that garden. Only the access way would open directly to my tower in Choreid Dhelerei.

  Tired as I was, having a goal restored me enough to perform the necessary spells. Then I finished by removing the spells around the dyr. My mood was dark enough for me to think, If something happens to me, it’s no more than I deserve.

  Nevertheless, my heart pounded unpleasantly as I picked the dyr up and then turned it over in my hand. It felt like it looked, a heavy object not quite stone and not quite metal.

  I dropped it into my robe’s inner pocket, where scribes usually kept their tools, then stepped through my access way into my tower.

  Nothing happened.

  I looked around again, startled to find the room so warm, especially as the fireplace was bare. The air was not only warm, but fresh. I wandered to my bedchamber, but my jug of fresh water was empty. I could summon a runner… I could get water on my own… But it felt good to sit down on my bed and then to stretch out my aching body.

  I woke when someone gave a gasp.

  I opened my eyes to discover a runner staring at me. An image of myself, starkly staring—pale, even gray-faced, struck me behind the eyeballs, and I closed my eyes. “Water,” I whispered, my hands over my face.

  Surprise, dismay, the urge to run goaded me before the door shut.

  Oh. The dyr in my pocket was bringing me the runner’s emotions. In spite of the throbbing headache, I rebuilt my mental shield. The reward was blessed quiet. I was alone in my own skull.

  The door opened, and the runner was back with water. I drank down two glasses, gasping for air, then wiped my eyes on my sleeve as I became aware of the rustle of cloth, the manifold breathings of several people.

  “Emras?” That was Anhar, speaking quietly. Cautiously. “You’re back.”

  She and Pelis and two more runners gazed curiously at me.

  “Where have you been?” Pelis asked.

  “Been?” I repeated witlessly. “I was on an errand,” I said in Kifelian, “I was just here yesterday. Wasn’t I?”

  Anhar and Pelis exchanged looks, then Anhar said, “If you were, no one saw you. No one has seen you fo
r eight, almost nine months.”

  I gave a cry of dismay; I wanted to disbelieve them. “The Fox vision,” I said. “That single glimpse must have thrown me out of time for nine months. I did not know that time would be so unreliable—” I stopped myself before I loosed incomprehensible babble about magic. “I’m glad I didn’t listen to an entire conversation, I might have vanished for a hundred years.”

  I became aware of painful silence and looked up. Four sets of eyes stared back at me.

  The time for secrets to end is now, but don’t be stupid about it. I rubbed my eyes, gathered my wits, and switched to Marloven. Normal. Sound normal.

  “I need a bath,” I said, and watched the runners’ faces clear at that. Pelis as well.

  As they all turned away, I caught Anhar’s robe. “Get Birdy,” I whispered wordlessly.

  Her brows shot up. She gave a slight nod, ducked around the others, and fled.

  Nine months? Reaction wrung through me, my limbs watery.

  Birdy and Anhar arrived together, both breathless. “I had to say you sent for him,” Anhar said. “He was on duty.”

  “Please tell me what I’ve missed,” I said, no longer trying to hide my urgency.

  Birdy came up to me, his gaze searching mine. “Will you tell us what we have missed?”

  My heart beat hard. “I will,” I promised. “Where is the king?”

  “He’s been in the north since spring. Lasva went to join him early in summer.”

  “She was in Olavair,” Anhar put in. “Talking to the Northern Alliance. She says they want Ivandred to agree to the Compact against arrows. They all have their hair cut short.”

  “Prince Macael’s brother hired mages to cause an avalanche in both passes,” Birdy said. “High and low. There’s no crossing over to Enaeran.”

  “Has Ivandred declared war?”

  “It has not been declared. But he’s been riding around up there, exercising the army. You know how the king can call up levies if the kingdom is in danger? Well, levies have been raising on their own, volunteering all across the north—”