Heritage of Fire

by Dave Luckett

  She handed him Jane's lead, and Gerd took it, in the automatic way all such things are accepted. Nela bent over the fallen guard, her hand on his forehead. She winced.

  "You hit him hard," she murmured.

  "I had to. He wouldn't go down the first time. We can't stand around now." Gerd glanced back at the house. There were no new lights showing, not yet. Any time now, though.

  She muttered something, and stood. "At least I can stop the bleeding within, I think. He'll probably recover. Probably." She turned away. "Let us go, then."

  They swung down the path, turned on to the road, and began the march.

  "They'll be looking for us on the road," remarked Gerd, an hour later. The town lay behind them, and the valley stretched ahead. "They can get a message out ahead of us, to bar the way." He breathed out, looking up at the stars. "They have a stable full of horses, too. There'll be a party out after us by first light. Another three hours."

  "Yes. We'll have to head for the mountains. Eastward, and then south, once we lose them. But I don't know the roads. If there are roads."

  "Nor I. But there's a crossroads in a mile or so. I saw it on the way in. Well-trodden, too, and the first of several. They can't track us among all the other marks, and the hills aren't far."

  He tried to sound confident. Perhaps he even succeeded. But the only thing now was to make distance. He stepped out, and Nela matched him. Jane trotted stolidly behind.

  They reached the crossroads and turned left, heading for the mountains, and concentrated on making distance. Dawn came up bright, with birdsong, a fine dry day, but no summer lasts forever. The weather might not hold, and must be used to the utmost.

  The fading stars had told them that they were headed generally east, perhaps a little south, but the sun, when it rose, gave them better direction. The mountain line reared ahead of them. Already the road was less travelled, the country rougher. The change was far faster than when moving away from Walse. This was a narrower valley, a poorer part of the country. Once you left the lush river-flats, the bones of the land thrust through, with little soil to soften them.

  They halted at noon, feeding and watering Jane. Here was in a dip in the road, which had deteriorated to a pathway, where it swung to the right and crossed a stream that flowed towards the main river. Trees crowded close around the little ford. They had been left standing to hold banks. Jane was glad to drink, and Gerd as well, but when he had finished, he climbed the further slope, which was steeper, and looked back.

  He had reason to be glad the day was a dry one. There was a swirl of dust on the road, a couple of miles back, but coming fast. They'd be here in a few minutes. He sprinted back.

  "Get off the road. Head upstream. Quick!"

  Nela asked no questions. She led Jane off, splashing through the shallow water, then up a shelving rock, finding shelter in the stand of trees. A thicket of young hazels gave a screen. Gerd made sure his sword was loose in its sheath. He would not draw it unless he had to. The bright of the blade might catch the sun. They stood still, and in the sudden silence, Gerd could hear the hoofbeats.

  The horsemen reached the brow of the height behind and started down the slope. They were well-mounted, but their horses were lathered. Doesn't matter, thought Gerd grimly. They're ahead of us now. And there's not a thing we can do about it.

  One of them was certainly a mage, a young man who rode without weapons, carrying a staff and a pack, but the other three were Kihreeans with spears, swords and helmets. No Kihreean rode well, for most would never have seen a horse on their remote, stony isles; but these ones pushed their mounts along, bouncing awkwardly in their saddles, stolid and grim-faced. The squire, armoured and mounted on Hugo, would have cut them down hardly without effort, but Gerd could never take three of them at once like this, and a mage to boot.

  They splashed through the ford and eased up to take the further slope, walking until they reached the ridge, then moving up to a jolting trot again.

  Gerd waited until the hoofbeats died away. "Well," he said.

  Nela said nothing. She waited.

  "They don't know we're on this road," Gerd said at last. "If they did, there'd have been a lot more of them. They're just sending parties out along every road."

  Nela, however, had grasped the essential. "They're ahead of us now. They'll be giving descriptions of us to every mage along the road, and every one of them will be watching for us, and all of them can call others in." She considered the extent of the timber on the nearby slopes. "Can we keep to the trees?"

  Gerd glanced up at the hanging woods. "No. This is worked and broken up, not virgin forest. There'll be people about in them: swineherds, foresters, charcoal burners, wood bodgers. Travelling off the road will only make us stand out more."

  She nodded, accepting that. "What, then?"

  "Well, I think we'd better travel by night."

  "Yes. What else?"

  He shrugged, uneasily. Her eyebrows shot up. "That's all? Travel by night? That's it?" She stared at him, then shook her head. "It might help, but they're quiet people here, once out of the town. I can't remember seeing any of them about after sundown. Late travellers will be noticed." She paused. "Was that your the whole of your plan, then?"

  Gerd looked uncomfortable. "We had to get away. We still have to get away. You said so. There wasn't any choice."

  "I told you to go. It's me they're mainly after now. If you were on your own, there wouldn't be all this fuss - what's a run apprentice, after all? - and you could travel faster alone anyway."

  Gerd looked stubborn. "I wasn't going to leave you. You were a captive who would become a hostage. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I am not going to leave you."

  She stared at him. Slowly, he became aware of what he had just said. He cleared his throat and went on hurriedly. "I thought they'd be able to do this, anyway. It stood to reason that they'd be able to move faster on their own roads than we can. They know almost exactly when we left, and they know we're on foot, with only a donkey. So what they'll do is, they'll work out how far we could have gotten in the time available. The parties they send will go to that distance, rouse out the countryside to look out for strangers, and then they'll wait for us to walk up to them."

  "So...?" Nela prompted.

  "So, the first thing is to wait. If we don't walk into their arms, they'll start to think we might have slipped through, and they'll widen the search, which spreads them thinner. A couple of days should do it, and we should be able to manage that much, if we keep still. It's movement that gets noticed."

  "All right. We wait. That's the first thing. What's the second?"

  "I bought some things in town. We'll have different clothes..." He swung his pack around and groped inside it.

  Nela frowned as he brought out coarse peasant tunics and patched breeches, and a pair of old cloaks with hoods. They made a pathetic little bundle. She shook her head. "That's not going to fool them."

  "Well, it won't pass a close inspection. The trick is not to let it get that far."

  "How do we do that?"

  "Um... I won't let them get that close."

  Nela rolled her eyes. "Oh, very well thought out! That's your plan, is it? If anybody peers too closely at us, you hit him over the head and drag the body into the bushes. And all his friends. As with the gate guard."

  "Look, there was no time to go into all the details, and that gate guard... they'd have flayed us alive if they'd caught us."

  "What? Nonsense. I hardly think so. We'd have had some explaining to do, but up 'til then we were merely trying to decline their hospitality..." She inspected his face. "Or no. You know different. There's something you haven't told me."

  22

  They waited an hour, then left the road and climbed the further slope. At the top of that was a wood, more open than the timbered thicket around the stream. That allowed for a fast retreat in any of several directions, but they had to move more deeply into it for concealment.

  "So you found a ma
gelock on that door," Nela said, stepping around a stone. The bones of the earth were beginning to break through the thin soil. "Found it and found the way around it. That's ... interesting." She pursed her lips, frowning.

  "What, that they had a lock on it?"

  "Mm? Oh. No. Not that there was a lock on it - though that would mean that one of the masters thought it was important enough to devote part of his attention to such a thing. What's interesting is that you managed to defeat it without breaking it." She stared around at the woodland, which was gradually thickening as they climbed the slope. Firewood was easier to take from lower down. "That means that you can actually shape a spell. Shape it and mould it and change it, not simply make it. You changed the shape of that spell. Very few can do that. None, in fact, in a generation or more. I didn't understand ...Mind you, I should have understood... the amount of power you have..." She fell into a study, chewing gently on her lower lip.

  "This is as good a place as any," said Gerd, halting.

  It was a minor saddle between two low heights, not deserving the title of "pass". The growth was thicker in the cusp, which provided cover, and there was enough grass between the trees for Jane for a day or two. Beyond the height, the ground fell away more sharply to worked fields again, but narrower ones than before. The hills were getting higher.

  "We can see anything coming towards us from here," said Gerd. He knelt and dropped his pack. "It'll be cold food for a while, though. We can't risk a fire."

  Nela waved a hand in dismissal of that problem. "We'll need several days," she said. "You should learn the value of fasting for sharpening the talent. We're going to need your talent good and sharp."

  Gerd turned to unpacking Jane and tethering her, asking no questions. A cover could be contrived with a dull green tarpaulin he had brought, slinging it between two saplings and under the canopy of the leaves. He looked at the lie of the land. They were near the top of the slope; only a cloudburst could rain them out. Setting out the camp took no more than a few minutes. When it was finished he moved carefully downslope, leaving few marks, and circled the site, looking at it from all angles. Only an expert huntsman might be able to follow them; anyone else would be likely to walk within twenty paces of the little gully and never see them.

  He was betting that the mages and the Kihreeans between them would have few huntsmen to call on. They were seamen and mages, not nobles addicted to chasing beasts through the woodlands. Probably that was right. Gerd shook his head. He was no great lover of the word "probably", but it was the best he was going to get.

  He returned to where Nela was waiting. She had seated herself cross-legged on the ground, and her face had taken on the inwardly-contemplating expression Gerd knew. She was calling lore up.

  "Watch me," she commanded.

  He squatted on his heels, watching her face. She pulled the hood of her cloak partly over her head. Now she began to whisper.

  It was a trick of the light, he thought at first. Then he realised that what was happening. Her face was changing.

  Her fine, glossy dark hair grew coarse, and lightened to a muddy streaked brown. Her eyes also changed, becoming greenish, and her nose broadened. The jaw lengthened, changing the proportions of her face, and her skin grew darker, weather-roughened, pocked with old scars.

  His mouth opened. Dragons were one thing, but this...

  "Would you know me?" she asked, her voice tight. She smiled. Her teeth had become crooked and dun-coloured.

  He shook his head, fascinated. "No..."

  But the seeming was rippling, fading. Through the false flesh, he could see her real face. It was emerging like a rock from under an ebbing tide.

  "Ah..." she breathed. The illusion flickered and vanished. She sighed and swayed, putting a hand down on the earth as if she would fall.

  He sprang up to support her, and his arm was around her shoulders before he knew what he was doing. She leaned against him, breathing soft and deep. For a moment her eyes flickered, but then they steadied. She turned her head, and it was as if it had found its natural place in the hollow of his shoulder.

  "You see?" she said, after a moment, but without moving. "Now, let us concern ourselves with air magic and seemings."

  She was right. It took days.

  On the second of them, about an hour into the afternoon, a horseman rode hard down the road below them, going towards Shelstro. As soon as he heard the hoofbeats Gerd brought Jane into the cover, but the rider passed on without a pause, splashing through the stream at the bottom of the slope, then picking up the pace again.

  They looked at each other, and then Gerd went back to the exercise he'd been set. The necessity had just sharpened.

  "The food won't last," he said that evening. "For us, or for Jane. We still have to get through the mountains."

  "We need at least one more day."

  "Why? I can now maintain a seeming for both of us, for a couple of hours. I'm sure I can manage longer, if I have to..."

  She made an impatient gesture. "Isn't it obvious? It won't be enough for your illusion to deceive an ordinary person. It must convince a mage, too. And any decent mage will be able to feel the spell you make. Just as you felt the spell on that lock."

  He blinked. "Well, perhaps we won't meet a mage..."

  "Of course we will. Anyone who finds us will see two people - man and woman -with a donkey, and that's what they're looking for. So they'll take us to the nearest mage - there's one in every village - and the mage will inspect us."

  He stared at her. "So you're saying, it's all in vain. If we're seen, we're finished anyway."

  "No. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it's taken you a day and a half to learn a particular seeming. I think it'll take you at least as long to learn to hide it." She paused. "Because that's more than I can do, and more than any mage now living. You don't hide magic by covering it up. It can't be covered up. You hide it by not allowing it to be where whoever's looking for it is looking. And that takes spellshaping."

  He shook his head. "Pardon?"

  "What would you have felt if the spell on that door had moved about, avoiding your touch, not being where you felt for it?"

  "Um... "

  "You might - might! - have felt a dim perception of power, but you would never have been able to disarm it like that. And even that, I am certain, you would only have felt because you are who you are. I doubt that most mages would be able to feel that much." She smiled. It was an open guileless smile. "So. First you have to be able to feel the other mage's touch. Or see it, or whatever figure your mind uses - it is only a figure, you know, like colour. And then you have to shape the spell so that it isn't there, where his feeling is. It isn't possible at a distance, but a spellshifter could do it, if she - or he - is able to watch the person closely who is trying to see the spell. I don't exactly know how you do it, but I do know that you can see or feel the pattern of a spell and that you can change it as you will. So now I want you to take up your face again. I'll try to feel the spell. You try to keep it from me. Ready?"

  That took another full day and most of the following night. Gerd pronounced himself ready the morning after. Nela said nothing. They cast a last glance around their campsite, then descended the slope to the road once more, and moved westward.

  Pedlars, thought Gerd. We're just a pair of pedlars, husband and wife. The donkey carries our stock in trade - needles, yarn, some notions, dyestuff, alum, buttons, ribbons, combs, small vials of sweet oil, dried herbs, oak galls. They plodded on, up the road, moving towards the mountains.

  Three miles further on, they came to a village. A mage-tower squatted above it, like a troll on a rock. Gerd hardly raised his eyes, and didn't alter his pace.

  They visited every house. It slowed them, but nothing else would do. The people were close of hand, mouth and face, and they had little. Sales were poor, but Gerd knew full well that it would never do to part with goods for less than their value, plus a profit. He counted the few pence he received for thre
e needles, an arm-length of red ribbon and a vial of mordant, and thrust them into his pack, muttering to himself.

  His wife, a sallow-faced woman with broad peasant features, took the donkey, and they pushed on, up the slope. The village mage was waiting by his tower, a foxy-looking little man leaning on his staff. Gerd bowed his head respectfully as he plodded up.

  "Hail," said the mage. "Where from?"

  "Shelstro, master," said Gerd, answering for his wife, of course. She halted, fiddling with the leading rein, looking down. "Left six days ago. Last at Penshill, but there was another man a day ahead of us on that road, so we came east instead..."