by Robert Brady
She had an odd mind, this one. The Emperor’s people thought differently than those of Fovea. Born of another reality, Glynn would expect by definition they would not think the same way. How odd to be faced with that actuality before she could even explore the theory.
Raven shook her head, her long black hair flying. “No, no, no,” she insisted. “You don’t understand.”
Glynn allowed herself a deprecating smiled. “Do I not?”
“No,” Raven told her. “I mean, you understand magic, you don’t understand my question.”
“You seek to know the source of magic, and I informed you it was elemental,” Glynn said. She let her eyes stray out across the plains. Loping half of a daheer ahead of them, Zarshar crossed the plain as their point guard. An equal distance behind them she could see Jahunga with his Toorians, running with spears over their backs. Karl rode either to the left or the right, presently the latter, his Volkhydrans opposite him. This left Xinto with the women, Glynn, Vedeen and Raven, to the center, and their dog and Slurn roving to any point of the compass. They’d spent two days on the road, Jack having drawn off all pursuit.
Since then Raven had been persistent in her eagerness to learn the craft. It was at first encouraging—Men are by their nature capricious in their quest for knowledge, taking little bites here and there and not sinking in their teeth to any one discipline. That Raven should commit wholeheartedly spoke of rare focus for her people.
Then she saw the other side of the mind of her people: savage, almost animal tenacity. It was very rare and terrible—Glynn could only assume the loss of her lover inspired her to greater efforts. The Emperor himself showed signs of this behavior. The race of Men possessed the ability to focus on one goal to the exclusion of all else, taking giant strides, even to the deterioration of their own health and well-being. Glennen Stowe had been such a Man. Now she recognized it in their Raven.
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” Raven insisted. “There is no elemental home of fire. It is like saying there is an elemental home of sand. I can get sand anywhere.”
“Sand is the flesh of the god, Earth,” Glynn informed her—again. The girl wasn’t dense; she simply had strange and basically incorrect assumptions she had to work out of her mind, in order to move forward. Every mentor since the first student had needed to do the same thing, however Glynn had never mentored before.
In a perfect world she would have stayed Raven’s progress until she worked these issues out for herself, either through study or meditation. This was far from a perfect world, however, and they enjoyed precious little time.
“No,” Raven informed her, once again. “Sand is a mixture of chemicals, mostly silicon, which has certain properties, like when you heat it, you can turn it into glass.”
“The eyes of Earth,” Glynn informed her.
Raven sighed. The truth could be frustrating—not everyone could absorb it.
“You think there is a place where fire is born,” Raven said, “and you think that you can go there, in your mind, get some, and bring it back here.”
“I have done so many times,” Glynn said. “I discipline my mind to find the way, so I can travel there quickly, when I need.”
“So how does a candle do it?”
“A candle can’t, it must be lit.”
“How about flint and steel?”
“They are opposites and hate each other,” Glynn began.
“Oh, please.”
“If you reject the knowledge, I cannot make you learn,” Glynn allowed her irritation into her voice that time.
And then, the frown again.
“Okay,” Raven tried again, “you understand how you get steam from boiling water?”
“Water rejects the fire’s fury,” Glynn informed her.
The destination would never arrive soon enough.
* * *
Tartan Stowe decided he would rise early rather than late for a change, and ordered his guard to wake him with the first dawn. He’d intended to run out to the pickets and conduct inspections of his sentries. Lupus had taught him long ago that it was better he should surprise them than his enemies.
He’d just pulled on his boots when a scream shook the camp.
His sword, still in its sheath, lay across a chest next to his furs. He grabbed it instinctively and swung it free of its scabbard as he leapt out into the dawn through his tent flap. Scrambling warriors greeted him, forming a circle around Nina of the Aschire, on all fours outside of her own collapsed tent, pounding the ground with her fist and shrieking.
He ran to her side, forcing himself through the crowd of blank-faced warriors, and knelt beside her. Blood flowed free from her nose and dripped down her ear lobes. Tartan had seen this before. She’d been casting, and something had gone wrong.
An Eldadorian wizard had taught him of what they called, “Blacklash,” the return of energies directed out by the caster. One would send a simple query, a finding spell, something innocuous, and its power would be fired back as a weapon along the same conduit to the unsuspecting caster.
Shela’s protégé should have been trained too well.
“Nina,” he demanded, taking her by the shoulder. He’d been trained to handle this, as a commander of such people, because when a wizard fell it would be natural for all eyes to turn to him. Mere Men and Uman feared those so gifted.
“Nina,” he repeated, shaking her as she screamed, pounding a bloody spot on the ground beneath her, her knuckles already raw. “Focus, Nina. Overcome it. You’re on the Eldadorian plains, you’re in my army. You’re escorting me to find rebels to the Empire.”
“I know where I am,” she growled through gritted teeth. Even these were lined with blood. “I’d thought I found them for you, but it seems that this ‘Jack’ has more close to his vest than a big belly.”
She stopped punching the ground, turned over on her hip, and sat. She raised her left fist between them, regarded her bloody knuckles and chuckled a little, curling her tongue over her pinkish teeth.
“What happened,” Tartan demanded. Behind him, he could feel the Men and Uman part, and guessed the Duchess had found her way to them.
Nina looked him in the eyes. Tartan had so rarely seen eyes of grey, and Nina’s, he admitted, had always fascinated him. They seemed full of chagrin now—one of the Emperor’s “you got me” looks, where he lost a little and admitted it.
Nina considered herself his daughter as much as an Aschire. That was no secret to anyone.
“Last night I went out to look at the tracks we’re following,” she said. “Your clever scouts failed to inform you they are from one horse with huge hooves.”
“Little Storm?” Tartan had been informed of the Emperor’s gift to his kinsman.
Nina nodded. “He took their beacon and ran south, and we followed him as he intended. His allies are half way to Andurin by now, just as they planned. He knows that, on Little Storm, we’ll never catch him, and eventually he’ll run full out and perhaps even beat them to Groff’s city.”
“If he’s for Groff’s city then he’s Groff’s problem,” Tartan informed her, standing. He extended his hand and she surprised him by taking it. Nina must have been sorely tested if she admitted weakness of any kind. “Inform Lupor’s new governor what’s happened, and we’ll return to Angador.
She shook her head. “If we know where he’ll be going then we can cut him off from getting there,” she said. “We can spread our warriors west and, when he doubles back, we’ll have him.”
“First of all,” Yeral said, stepping up next to Tartan, “these aren’t our warriors, these are Angadorian Knights who answer to the Duke. Second, on Little Storm, no one of us will catch this Man no matter what we do. He’ll charge our lines—”
Tartan found himself shaking his head, even as he saw Nina doing the same. Yeral had been an unfortunate choice for a bride for him, a woman of great mind but of no family. Now she grasped power whenever she could find it and did everything she could to poiso
n him against the Emperor, a man she blamed for disgracing her father and her family.
In fact, Tartan didn’t hate the Emperor, he merely knew he would never be the Emperor, and to a Man like Rancor Mordetur, such failure seemed unforgivable. Tartan could never learn enough, never know enough, and never be brave enough to do more than darken the Emperor’s shadow.
Tartan Stowe’s father had let a kingdom down, and never tried to teach his son to replace him, as a son should have. Lupus’ crime was to attempt that training, only to realize Tartan wasn’t up to it.
What Lupus had done to him was far worse.
“Little Storm is a fast horse,” Tartan said, “but not invincible. The Man we seek is still old. He’ll come north eventually, and when he does, he won’t outrun our archers, especially on the plains.”
He turned to Nina. “Go to the Emperor and tell him about this,” he said. “Don’t send someone, go yourself. We have our own wizards, but you have seen things the Emperor must know.”
“I am assigned—” Nina began.
“I am the Duke of Angador,” Tartan informed her. He caught his wife’s smirk even as the Aschire girl straightened. “As the Emperor would say, this is ‘my call.’ You and I both know the only thing he hates more than failure is to be kept in the shadow.”
“In the dark,” Nina said, frowning. The blood was already drying on her face. She sighed. “You’re right—it’s time to get back to him. He’ll have a lot of questions, and I have to answer them.”
She took Tartan by his upper arm, and looked him in the face. Normally Tartan didn’t like to be touched, but Nina, if not an actual friend, had known him longer than most. They’d both been schooled in some way under the Emperor.
“Be careful of him, your Grace,” Nina told him. “He’s more than he seems. Whatever he did to me, he almost killed me. I know Raven has learned some magix, but whatever this Jack has, he wields it like a hammer and he’s hidden it even from the Empress.”
Tartan nodded. “I’m not without my resources either, Nina of the Aschire,” he said, and they both smiled to each other. “When we were living in Galnesh Eldador, it wasn’t always you getting me into trouble.”
She grinned even wider. It was a rare site from Nina of the Aschire, the watch-bitch of the Emperor’s scions.
She turned and she sprinted towards the back of a horse, just being saddled. A natural acrobat, she placed two hands on its rump and vaulted into his saddle, taking the reins as the gelding reared.
“That’s—” Yeral began, but he raised two fingers and quieted her. It was one of his personal horses, of the three that he rode during the day. If it bore her safe to the Emperor, she was welcome to it.
“I’ve more horses,” Tartan informed her. Nina already had the skittish mount under control and was picking her way to the outskirts of the camp—the jess doonar or ‘little city’ that Wolf Soldiers made.
Tartan turned on his heel to find his captains and to inform them of the change in their strategy. Let the old man run, he thought.
He had one place to go, and it was through Tartan Stowe now.
Let him try that twice.
* * *
Damn!
There, on the edge of his vision, Jack saw Eldadorian soldiers, standing atop a hill, looking south for him.
It had been like this for three days. As fast as he could travel west, he’d seen Eldadorians on the prowl from him.
They hadn’t gotten ahead of him, Jack thought, they just hadn’t gotten out from behind him.
He’d come to reconcile himself to the idea that it had been Nina or Shela, not Vedeen, in his brain three days ago, and he’d tipped his hand to her.
Since then he’d dropped the beacon in a stream, making a little raft for it, in hope they’d go chasing it. No such luck! They were on every hilltop and in every valley, rooting through every farmhouse for him. They’d nearly trapped him a dozen times, and they had to know they were close to him.
He needed to send them in another direction, at least long enough for him to get through their lines. Once to their north, he could make a straight line to one of the little fishing villages on Tren Bay and then to Outpost IX.
Jack watched the patrol, but they weren’t moving.
“You, there!” someone said from behind him, in the language of Men.
Jack’s heart almost leapt out of his chest.
He turned to see an Uman farmer, a woman next to him, a pitchfork in his hand. They had a dog at their side, not a mastiff like the one he’d befriended, something more like a retriever, its ears pinned back, not showing his teeth but ready to.
“Good day, good sir,” he said, inclining his head.
“Don’t good sir me,” the Uman said. “You’re the one they’re on about, aren’t you?”
Damn it! If he ran, they’d yell for those soldiers and, if he didn’t, then they’d turn him over to them.
“I’m, um—don’t suppose you’d care if I’m unjustly accused, would you?” Jack stammered. A soft close, from his experience as a sales person. If you can’t make the sale, then beg for sympathy and have them sell themselves.
The Uman shook his head. “If you’re thinking I’m going to turn you over to the Empire, then you’re a stranger to these lands. Just wanted to make sure I was helping out someone worth helping,” he said, and his wife beside him, a skinny waif with long, green hair, smiled. “If you’re smart, you’ll walk that pony after me, and then at dusk we’ll send you out by Milly’s Gulch. Only locals knows that route; it’ll get you out of our lives ‘fore the next dawn.”
Glynn had informed him, what seemed like months ago, the Emperor’s subjects didn’t love him. He’d spoken to the porters who feared the Emperor would hurt them just because he could. If these felt the same way then maybe he had a chance?
More likely they’d hold him until someone else brought that patrol around.
Either way, he might get a free meal out of it, and he was already starving. He dismounted.
“I’m in your debt, good sir,” he said, and lowered his head.
His wife giggled. “Well,” the Uman said. “You sure as don’t look like some threat to the Empire. My guess is you’re just another Man, got into the wrong place when you least expected it.”
Jack smiled, extending a hand to the Uman, “You have no idea,” he said.
* * *
“Crap on a cracker!”
“Pardon?” Glynn’s eyebrows rose over her ambiguous eyes.
Raven refocused her mind, and reapplied her will.
The sun was setting to their west, the sky turned pink and black, clouds floated above her with bloody fringes and the land around her had that unearthly dusk light to them. Their warriors or helpers or whatever they called themselves had collected a pile of dead branches and Glynn had asked her to light them with her magic.
She’d called fire before, but now she had all of these make-no-sense images of elemental planes of fire in her head, and she couldn’t reach them, so she couldn’t call the flame.
Maybe Glynn’s real goal had been to neutralize her power. If so, she’d done a good job.
“If you aren’t able…” Glynn said, as condescendingly as ever.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Vedeen’s sea-blue eyes. The Druid had her hair bound down her left shoulder in front of her, and that silly, serene look she always seemed to have.
“I think you’ve mixed your metaphors, sweet one,” she said.
Beside her, the dog thumped its tail and seemed to grin up at Raven. The first time she’d seen it, she couldn’t help thinking, “That is the ugliest friggin’ dog I’ve ever seen.” It followed either Zarshar or Vedeen everywhere.
“My—metaphors?” she repeated. She knew the word, but she didn’t know if it meant the same in Uman as it did in English.
“You used to have an idea of what fire is,” Vedeen said.
“The wrong idea,” Glynn asserted. Raven just nodded.
&
nbsp; Vedeen smiled. “The Uman-Chi focus their teaching on form more than substance,” she said. “They achieve great power, this is true, but it is more important to them that they achieve it for certain reasons.”
“Or else we’d be just—” Glynn began, but then caught herself.
“Or else you’d be just Men,” Raven finished for her.
Glynn’s silver-on-silver eyes could have been looking anywhere.
Raven straightened her back.
It didn’t matter if flame came from an elemental plane of fire or existed as the transfer of matter to kinetic energy as carbon and oxygen molecules recombined.
In fact, in her mind’s eye, she could see those molecules doing just that. She looked at a branch in the pile before her, really looked at it, and imagined in her mind all of the molecules it must be composed of, all of the atoms in those molecules, neutrons and protons and electrons flying around, crashing into each other but still holding form in a lattice that made this thing a branch.
In her mind, she broke the rule, and she took away a little piece of that branch, freed a portion of it from being wood, and let it be protons, neutrons and electrons, all swirling in a mass.
As she did this in her mind’s eye, her actual eyes saw a corner of a branch waiver, then become a silvery globule pulsing and sparking next to the pile.
The wood, wet and dry, burst into flame.
“Gently, Raven, gently,” Vedeen chided her. “You release all of its energy—but energy—”
“Cannot be created, and cannot be destroyed,” she said, to the other women, clamping her will down with these mental muscles Nina had helped her to develop. “It can only change form.”
“Or be sent to another plane,” Glynn insisted. “Though even then, something must be drawn from there.”
It would be pointless, Raven thought, to make the freed neutrons and protons back into wood. They had plenty of wood. Instead, she imagined the crystal lattice of a blood-red ruby. She’d studied the corundum in her last semester in college.
That brought back memories she had to beat back like flies from distracting her. The lattice of a corundum is actually a very basic one, which is what makes them perfect for lasers.