by David Weber
“Momma! Mommaaaaaaaa!”
Gwynna’s screams rose as another peak approached, and Leeana ached to touch her. But Lentos forbade it. Gwynna was desperate for her mother, but the touch of Leeana’s hand might open a direct link, pouring her personality into the child. It was the inflooding of foreign thoughts and minds which had driven Gwynna to this extremity; the closer embrace of any mind, even Leeana’s, would break her sanity forever. Even Master Trayn dared not open his mind to hers fully lest it destroy them both.
“Momma! Poppa! No, Poppa! Don’t go there!!”
Gwynna fought the maelstrom, writhing in exquisite agony as the wash of alien minds ripped through her and she flinched away from the hurtful edges of concepts and images which were not hers. Her selfhood twisted on the edge of dissolution, exposed to too many other selves, too many other perceptions, too much beauty and ugliness, and her heart hammered to destruction, perilously near death. Her agony was mirrored on the magi’s faces, yet their training blocked all but a shadow of the torment she faced alone and terrified.
Trayn Aldarfro relaxed for a moment. He had to, lest he burn out his talent, yet only his trained sensitivity had any chance of breaking through to her. He forced his own heart to slow, and his eyes met Lentos’, filled with fear. Not for himself, but for Gwynna.
Lentos’ own face was calm, but his heart ached, for the Academy had been wrong.
Gwynna was dying.
Sorrow twisted him, but he faced it squarely. The girl’s powers were simply too great. They surpassed the mightiest savants of the Academy, and no one had quite believed they could. She’d writhed in isolated madness for over ten hours, and still her barriers stood! She couldn’t screen out the visions driving her to destruction, but she could lock out the guidance which might have led her back to life.
He bent his head. The greatest gift he could give her now would be to stop her heart, yet that was forbidden so long as an ember lingered with the glimmer of a hope that she might survive to inherit the bounty of her talents. But he knew it would be kindest, and not just to the child he loved. How much more of Gwynna’s suffering must Leeana endure before it ended in death? It would be kinder to both to end it, yet he couldn’t.
He drew a deep breath and nodded to Trayn, and the empath closed his eyes, marshaling his strength once more for the hopeless task. He was forty years Lentos’ junior, yet he could no more abandon the battle than Lentos could have, even though continuing might well cost his own sanity when Gwynna finally, mercifully, died.
The girl screamed as fresh visions assailed her—more and worse than the minute-to-minute flow of thoughts about her. Images of past and present flared behind her eyes, brilliant, incomprehensible…terrifying. She whimpered and tried to thrust them away, her brain flailing blindly, self-destructively, in her extremity, but there was nowhere she might hide from the madness.
She saw her father surrounded by blades, standing astride her fallen mother. She saw a terrible, glittering storm of wizardry blasting through forgotten caverns. She saw leering yellow eyes, slitted like a cat’s, promising death into worse than death. She saw heaps of dead and carrion crows, saw a tattered standard of gryphon and crown, its staff clutched in the stiff hand of a fallen hradani. She saw—
She didn’t know what she saw. She had no way to comprehend it, and the images stuttered in her thoughts like lightning. They were too close-paced, too violent. They merged and overlapped into a maddening whole she could neither grasp nor endure. Her head went back at her eyes bulged, and behind everything was the glare of the wild magic, scattering its violence as it gouged and fought over twice a thousand years and more of time.
The glittering sorcery terrified her, but it also touched a last strand of her fraying selfness. The wildfire! She knew the wildfire—had always known it!
Her mouth opened and blood flew from her bitten lips as she screamed to the wildfire presence which had always loved and protected her.
“Wennncitttttttt!”
* * *
Water chuckled against a wooden hull, and Wencit of Rūm sat in the darkened cabin, its scuttles and quarter windows shuttered against the afternoon light. His haunted face was streaked with sweat in the glow of his wards, and he clutched his sword hilt in trembling hands as his power reached out with all the strength and desperation of his ancient heart.
Belhadan lay seven hundred leagues to the north, and he knew what struggle raged in a cheerful bedroom there. His might hammered at the distance, frantic to smash the resistance which blocked him from that room, and his nerves groaned with the long strain of his effort. Wild magic danced in his blood like fire and his art racked him with agony, yet he dared not blink, could not relent for an instant.
If the moment came, it would be fleeting.
And then, far to the north, Gwynna’s shattering mind turned to the wild wizard. Even as she screamed his name, her terrified thought winged across the miles in an agonized search for safety.
Wencit stiffened. His eyes flared, their glare spangling the bulkheads, and the cabin seemed to rock to the blinding efflorescence and silent explosion of his effort. Sorcery shaped and honed to fight for a world slammed across the leagues in a reckless race to save one small and precious life. His might smashed into her barriers with the power of a hurricane and the delicacy of a humming bird, and across the width and breadth of two continents, every soul sensitive to the art winced and hissed for breath before the uncounting prodigality with which he poured out his power like fire and shaped it with his very life.
* * *
Gwynna shrieked, and Leeana lurched up at the sound of her daughter’s unadulterated agony. Her hands flew out, but Lentos’ warning shout stopped her fingers inches from the twisting body. She went to her knees beside the bed, her lips trembled, and her eyes burned, but she dared not touch her.
Master Trayn’s head snapped back as if he’d been clubbed. He slid to his knees, shrugged aside by the cable of power driving at Gwynna’s crumbling defenses. Lentos gasped in anguish as he caught the backlash of the blow, yet he shook his head, clinging desperately to the jerking body while his brain blazed with wonder and confusion.
Gwynna hung timelessly above an abyss, and the darkness beckoned to her. It promised rest, an end to torment and terror and confusion, and she yearned towards the peace of nonbeing. Its welcoming embrace reached out to her, and her hold on life shattered cleanly.
She began the slide down the slope of death, but streamers of wild magic and something more—something stronger than sorcery, deeper than mage power—clawed at her barriers with desperate delicacy. World-crushing strength compressed them, and a strand suddenly snapped. Her web of thought whipped, unraveling like an overstressed stay, and an alien presence, strong and ancient, thundered into her. It seized her with ruthless love—caught her, like fingers in her hair, dragging her back from the brink of peace inch by agonized inch. She fought it, hurling herself away from it, seeking the dreamless sleep, but it refused to release her.
She hesitated. She had the power to embrace the darkness. Not even that titanic power could stop her from ending her torment. But if she did, that ancient strength would go with her. She would take that other—that warm, fiercely loving other—with her, for it would never surrender her to death…and would never let her go alone.
She teetered on the cusp of decision, and it was a choice no child could make. Dim perceptions of endless struggles and subtle plans beat her with mallets of fire, twisted her upon a rack of horrified understanding and the deathless hope of that other. She fought to reject its strength. She fought to retain her childhood, even at the price of death, for if she lived she would never be free of her own power and the ageless torment of her visions. But innocence was a treasure she could keep only if she chose death for that other, as well. And somehow, even in that moment of chaos and anguish, she knew she could no more refuse the love which would not let her go than it could abandon her.
She relinquished childhood, abando
ned the quest for peace. She turned once more to the agonizing struggle for life, and steel-strong bands of love locked her close. They raised her out of her torment like powerful arms, and she surrendered her inner self to them, her last barriers crashing into ruin while warm wildfire eyes bore her up through blackness and worse than blackness into sleep.
* * *
Wencit collapsed.
His sword rang on the deck, and his head rolled slackly as he searched for the glow of his wards. If they failed, he died, for he was drained, his power muted by an application far beyond even its limits. The plans and hopes of five millennia hung upon defenses he could strengthen no further, yet he felt no regret. Even a wild wizard was entitled to risk his life for one dearer to him than continents.
His half-blind eyes found the wards. They glowed still, protecting him, and he sighed gratefully as he slid down into the darkness.
* * *
Lentos rose shakily and bent over Gwynna, feeling the strong, slow pulse in her throat. His face lost its habitual detachment, and he turned radiant eyes to Leeana, lifting her to embrace her gently.
“Is—?”
For all her courage, it was a question Leeana Hanathafressa couldn’t frame, and he shook his head ever so slightly.
“The crisis has passed,” he said simply. “How is more than I can say, yet it’s passed. Gwynna will live, Leeana.”
“Thank you, Lillinara!” Leeana whispered. “Oh, thank you, Friend of Women!”
She clung to Lentos, and the hardihood of the war maid vanished in the tears of a mother.
“Indeed,” Lentos said gently, “we all have much to be thankful for. But now she must come to the Academy. We must start her on the path of self-knowledge. She’ll someday go where none of us can follow, but for now we must teach her to protect herself from the world.”
“I understand,” Leeana said, sobbing in relief. She knelt beside the bed once more to stroke a slack cheek and felt the warmth of life. She laid her head on Gwynna’s chest and gathered her close, cradling her for long minutes before she laid her back with a kiss. “Take her, Master Lentos. Teach her. And, when you can, send her home to me.”
“We will, Milady,” Lentos said formally. Then he nodded to an even shakier Master Trayn, and the two magi lifted the limp body in gentle hands.
Leeana followed them from the bedchamber, followed down the stairs, across the deserted taproom, and watched them place the small form carefully into the scepter-badged carriage. She stood erect, her spine straight, her shoulders squared, green eyes bright as the carriage door closed, and then she watched it out of sight, ignoring the hesitant hand Farmah placed upon her shoulder.
Only when the carriage had vanished did she collapse into the other woman’s arms in tears.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Korun in the Spring
Korun was a welter of sights, sounds, and smells—a confusion of the senses made even worse because Kenhodan had grown accustomed to the empty Western Sea. The raucous voices and seething life of the city, especially so late in the evening, daunted him.
He stood on the dock, pack on his back, while Bahzell and a curiously serene Wencit bid Brandark farewell. The wizard’s strange mood shifts worried Kenhodan. Yesterday, he’d been nervous, irritable and brooding—almost frightened. Now he looked simultaneously exhausted and glad, as if the weight of years had fallen on him in an afternoon, chipping holes in his armor, only to let flickers of some strange, deeply quiet joy shine through the chinks. It was good to see the old man smiling, exchanging cheerful insults and jests with the hradani, yet his changing spirits made the red-haired man vaguely uneasy. Wencit was Wencit of Rūm, the bedrock of endless legends and deadly serious history. He wasn’t supposed to be as changeable as Vonderland weather or the unstable ground on the slope of some Wakūo volcano, and Kenhodan tried to divert himself from his puzzlement—and, however little he liked admitting it, worry—by studying the scene about him.
The day’s embers burned over distant Banark Bay, bathing the sky in blood. Wave Mistress’ masts bulked black and hard against the light, and lanterns and torches already lit the docks. A crisp breeze cut through the crowd sounds, flapping awnings briskly, snapping and popping Wave Mistress’ banners. The sunset was an ominous boil of smoke and burning cloud, and he was unpleasantly aware of approaching rain. Was he destined to be rained on in every city he visited?
“Well, lad,” Bahzell slapped his shoulder as he joined him, “be welcome to Korun. Not one of the Empire’s most respectable cities, I’m thinking, but as good a place as a man might ask to be getting his throat slit for a copper kormak.”
“I was just thinking that,” Kenhodan agreed, eyeing the motley crowd.
“Oh, it’s not so bad as all that.” Bahzell inflated his huge chest and grinned. “A bit wild, like all South March towns, but that’s the East Walls, I’m thinking. A man never knows what might be after brewing up there, so folk with their wits about them count on it’s being something nasty, just to be on the safe side. The worst bandits in the Empire are after making their homes up around the Traitors’ Walk, because it’d take half the Army to be rooting them out.” He shook his head and grinned, ears half-flattened. “That’s a job as not even the Order would be so very happy about taking on unless it was to happen we’d no choice about it. So the White Water rivermen are after looking after themselves, and it’s a tough, stubborn lot they are. They’ve a hard trade, and they’ve a right to their reputation as the south’s finest watermen, but there’s no one can deny they’re folk as make Korun lively.”
“I see.” Kenhodan watched a cluster of rivermen set upon one another with eye-gouging gusto. “I don’t much care how they manage their civic affairs, if they’ll just keep their knives out of me.”
“Wise of you.” Wencit joined them, and the bubble of laughter in his voice drew sidelong glances from both of them, although he seemed unaware of it. “They are a bit wild, especially during the Spring Festival, but they’re some of the Empire’s best fighters, too. And Korun boasts its share of cutpurses and backstabbers. The Thieves Guild thrives here, so bear that in mind.”
“You sound as if we’re less than welcome,” Kenhodan observed.
“I sound as if I’ve been here before,” Wencit corrected cheerfully. “But don’t expect gracious welcomes traveling with me. I’ll admit I have the odd friend scattered about, but don’t count on finding a comfortable fire to prop your feet in front of. Too many would like me dead—and you with me—and there’re more than a few in Korun, among other places, who’d cheerfully kill us both at bargain rates, no questions asked.”
“I note your deep concern,” Kenhodan said dryly. He watched the brawl for a moment, then turned to Bahzell. “You watch the shadows on the left. I’ll watch the ones on the right, and Wencit can watch our backs. But who’ll watch his back?”
“Don’t get too cheerful,” Wencit growled. “You two might match any assassin in a fair fight, but neither of you has eyes in the back of his head or a poison-proof belly.”
“Aye.” Bahzell sounded unusually thoughtful. “I’d not thought of dog brothers, and Korun’s after being a likely spot for such as them. Oh, not on the docks, but there’s places in Korun as the city guard goes only in platoons.”
“In that case, I suggest we finish our business here as quickly as we can,” Kenhodan said pointedly.
“Agreed.” The hradani checked his bearings. “I’m thinking we’d best head for Lendri Street. There’s a man there as owes me a favor who can guarantee a good price on fast horses.”
“How can you be sure they’ll be fast? Or cheap?”
“Because Fradenhelm’s after stealing only the best and he knows as how I know he does,” Bahzell said simply.
“I thought you were a champion of Tomanāk,” Kenhodan said, quirking an eyebrow at him. “You know, the God of Justice?”
“And so I am,” Bahzell agreed genially. “But I’ve not stopped being a hradani, and my folk are after
having what you might be calling ‘contacts’ in places where little details like bills of sale aren’t so very common. And it’s never so very bad a thing for a champion to be having an eye inside such goings-on.”
“You mean he’s an informant?”
“Now ‘informant’s’ a hard, hard word,” Bahzell rumbled thoughtfully. “The kind of word as could get a man’s throat cut, now I’m thinking on it. So it’s in my mind we’d best call Fradenhelm…a fount of wisdom, let’s be saying.”
“I should’ve guessed,” Kenhodan sighed, shaking his head, and Wencit chuckled.
They fell into a loose formation and pushed off along a street so crowded that Kenhodan wondered who ran the city by day. Rough-trousered rivermen rubbed against prosperous merchants in silks, hucksters, food vendors, and itinerant entertainers. They were all there—from veiled lady to corner prostitute, from mime to beggar to magistrate’s clerk. They thronged the streets in a wall-to-wall ferment as they celebrated the season of the floods. Here and there a clumsy pickpocket’s fumbling gave him away or an intoxicated rowdy gave or took offense, but a path opened miraculously for Bahzell. Kenhodan wondered if the crowd was moved by recognition of who he was and the green surcoat of Tomanāk or if it was simple prudence, given his towering inches and the hradani’s reputation. But whatever its reason, the press of people parted and let them move with speed.
They crossed a quarter of the waterfront, then turned down a quieter street, and Kenhodan sighed with relief as the congestion thinned. He heard Wencit chuckle at his soft sound and wondered again what could have produced such cheerfulness.
Lendri Street was a good forty minutes’ walk from the docks, where the imperial high road cut through the city’s eastern arc of avenues and alleys. The smells of horse dung and hay hung in the air like a signpost as they followed Bahzell to a long, low building bearing the sign of a rearing horse. Bahzell beat on the closed door with a hard-knuckled fist, and the hollow booming woke a nickering equine chorus.