Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Keisha stifled a gasp of dismay, and Darian bit back a gasp of his own as his heart sank right down into his boots. Of all things, the very last that he wanted was a head-to-head mage-duel with someone whose power and abilities were a complete unknown to him.

  And the Shaman had maneuvered them all into a position where that was precisely what he would have to do.

  Twenty

  Keisha stopped herself from grabbing Darian’s sleeve to hold him back. Her lover closed his eyes a few moments, took a deep breath, and stepped forward. To her left, Daralie made a little whimper, but no other sound of protest, though she caught Kullen’s hand in hers and Keisha felt fear coming from both of them in waves.

  I’ll bet they never foresaw Darian confronting this mage face-to-face. They thought he’d just wave his hands at a safe distance and the Eclipse Shaman would fall into dust. Her throat was so tight it hurt to swallow. Too bad magic doesn’t work that way. ...

  Darian looked cool and untroubled as he stepped up to the barricade of brush and waited for the warriors of Raven to use fishing hook-poles to pull the thorns aside, so he could pass; only Keisha and Shandi could really know how apprehensive he was.

  The Shaman of Wolverine waved off his guard and stepped forward to meet Darian halfway between the two lines.

  Keisha held her breath, as the two mages stared into each others’ eyes while they established the stance they wished to begin with. There was some distance, to prevent the bystanders from being injured - maybe. Of all the clothing Darian could have grabbed in his haste to dress, Keisha thought it was interesting that he had grabbed the leather tunic and trews that he’d worn for his ceremony with Ghost Cat. In the war of minds that was almost as important as the war of magic, Darian had gotten a boost with that outfit - he was supposed to be an outland southerner, but he was wearing the clothing of the tribes. Some of the Shaman’s power came from the belief his followers had in him - and Keisha sensed a stirring of unease among them.

  Darian made a cool and calm backhanded insult to the mage he was facing, by turning his back to him for a moment - a wordless way of showing the mage was of so little concern he didn’t even have to keep an eye on him. Darian spread his arms, with his open hands at waist height, and two horse-lengths away from each hand, a wall of force grew up from the ground. As he drew his hands together, the ground churned up as if being plowed and the wall rose, looking like flattened bolts of lightning along its leading edge. When Darian’s palms met, there was a shimmering wall several times his height in a semicircle between himself and Raven, cupping him toward the Shaman’s side. Raising one eyebrow slightly, Darian turned to face the Shaman.

  The Shaman grunted, and reluctantly mirrored Darian’s action - the intent being to keep the opponent’s attacks from harming the mage’s own forces. The churning earth sputtered up in large uneven chunks, less plowed-looking and more like they were hammered upward from below. There was a resounding thud when the force-wall kicked up a log. The semicircles were barely visible to those who could not see the energies and powers that lay beneath the skin of the world. They shimmered a little in the early-morning sunlight, as if each mage had a structure of the thinnest, most delicate glass built around them as they faced each other.

  The two semicircles joined edge to edge with a visible flash, and Darian’s began to glow a very pale silver, while the Shaman’s restlessly flickered yellow. The effect faintly obscured the two mages inside, who backed away to get as much distance as possible between each other. No one would enter or leave now.

  The Shaman struck first, abruptly; he leaped into action, arms flailing as if he threw a handful of stones, pelting Darian with what looked like white-hot shooting stars, so bright they hurt the eyes. Keisha moaned and flinched away, her heart racing.

  Darian didn’t do anything outwardly, but the shooting stars bent their paths to either side, and bounced off something just in front of him, two of them slowing in midair before accelerating straight back at the Shaman.

  The Shaman reached out, caught them, and with a sly smile, drew his arms up in a slow arc. He displayed the catch to his men, and crushed the sputtering fireballs in his raised fists in a pyrotechnic show of dominance.

  Darian shrugged, as if the tactic hadn’t impressed him, and the Shaman’s smile turned to a frown. Is Darian going to attack next? Keisha wondered, her hands balled into fists at her side as she watched. The Shaman was obviously expecting him to do something equally showy in response, and his frown deepened.

  Darian didn’t even shift his weight; he waited patiently, with no sign of agitation or anger. Why? she wondered. Steelmind had come up to her other side unnoticed; he put a comforting hand on her shoulder and she jumped.

  “Darian is playing a waiting game,” he murmured in her ear. “When two Masters contend, there is no question of one running out of magic energy, for they use the ley-lines. Instead, usually the one who loses is the one who becomes physically fatigued soonest. Darian is rightly letting the Shaman expend his own strength first; he loses nothing by this, but if the Shaman were to play the same game, he would lose face with his warriors, who expect him to be aggressive.”

  The Shaman tried another few volleys of those shooting stars, but however thick and fast they came, Darian deflected them without turning a hair. They looked impressive - as most of his magics likely were - but the blazing attacks were treated with such apparent indifference by his opponent, the Shaman must have realized this bit of flashiness was working against him.

  The Blood Bear warriors, already keyed up and spoiling for a fight, had no patience with this onesided battle. They had been moving restlessly and muttering among themselves since the Shaman stepped forward. Just as Keisha glanced over at them, alarmed at a sudden rise in their anger, they charged the Raven defenses.

  Their screams of battle drowned out her own scream of fear, and she stumbled backwards and would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself. Steelmind had an arrow on his bowstring and another in the air before the enemy had gone more than a dozen steps.

  With her mouth dry and her heart racing, Keisha backed up further, and set herself behind the shelter of a carved pole just as the first set of enemy arrows rained down on their lines. The war cries of the fighters and the screams of the wounded drowned everything else, and her stomach turned over with nausea as the metallic scent of blood reached her.

  But something else pulled her out of her shelter; the need of those injured. She darted from cover, grabbed the nearest wounded man, and dragged him back to relative safety by his shirt. Then she went to work, blotting everything else out. Every man, woman, or child she could get back on his or her feet with a bow in their hands might give them a better chance. She couldn’t help Darian, she couldn’t wield a sword, but she could do this much.

  And she would.

  Darian watched the Eclipse Shaman through narrowed eyes, sensing the ebb and flow of power in the ley-line that the Shaman had linked to. He didn’t think it had occurred to the Shaman to do the same, and that gave him an edge in knowing when an attack would come, if not how. Then again, Darian had the advantage of Tayledras training, and not merely the standard training, but also Firesong’s version of that training. The Hawkbrothers were steeped in the precise and most efficient use of magic, passed on for many generations, and by comparison this Shaman was likely self-trained or tutored in rough skills at best.

  The Shaman began to prowl his half of the circle, pacing back and forth, eying Darian with barely suppressed fury. Outside the circle, there was a battle going on; someone had broken the promise the Shaman had made. But neither Darian nor his opponent dared pay any heed to anything outside their wall of power; any distraction would give the other a chance to strike the fatal blow.

  Darian began to move warily himself, watching the Shaman and nothing else, keeping the same distance between them at all times. Then the Shaman darted toward him, pushing his hands forward, palms out.

  A massive wall of force
hit Darian and knocked him backward; he’d have fallen if he hadn’t been moving himself; as it was, he had to dance sideways and fend off a second invisible blow, turning the force aside and into the wall of the sphere. That put him almost within physical reach of the Shaman, who made a grab for him.

  He dropped and rolled out of the way, jumping to his feet and putting the fullest possible distance between himself and the Shaman again.

  Again he watched the line even as he watched the Shaman, and again, an ebb in the power-level warned him before the Shaman attacked.

  Hands blazing with power, the Shaman lunged for him; there was no time to move out of the way, so Darian used the oldest of all of his defenses.

  The Shaman’s right foot caught on the earth for a critical moment; he stumbled and fell, catching himself with his outstretched hands. The power he had meant to use to blast Darian discharged into the ground, creating nothing worse than a blackened spot and the smell of scorched dirt.

  As he fell, Darian ran out of the way again; the Shaman picked himself up with red rage burning in his eyes. Darian reacted to the immediate drop in power just in time by strengthening his shields; this time the weapon he used was anything but subtle. He lashed at Darian with levin-bolts, whips of power that looked and hit like lightning.

  The levin-bolts arced into his shields with a crack that hurt his ears and an eye-burning light that made his eyes water. He held his shields against the bolts as the Shaman poured power into them and the air around him tasted of a thunderstorm at its peak.

  Abruptly, the Shaman released the bolts; Darian could barely see. Blinking tears out of his eyes, he used Mage-Sight to watch the Shaman instead, seeing him as a form laced with little threads of red and yellow.

  Those threads blazed up as the ley-line ebbed, but this time Darian reacted before the Shaman could; he made the Shaman’s foot stick again as the man moved sideways before his attack. The Shaman hadn’t expected an offensive move after so much defense; this time he fell hard, and while he was down, Darian lashed him with eye-burning levin-bolts.

  He held the bolts on his still-prone enemy until his own eyes had time to recover, then leaped sideways just as he released them, and just in time, for the moment he did so, the Shaman hit him with the conjured weapon he’d been planning to use.

  A massive sphere of energy rolled toward him, looking like fire with teeth, threatening to engulf him. He made a quick guess and assumed that the Shaman would expect him to run; he stood his ground instead, and held his shields. The sphere rolled right over him; it was dangerous in itself, for it immediately began to suck power from his shields, but it wasn’t as dangerous as the jagged spikes of energy that blasted out a pit right where Darian would have been if he’d run.

  That made another obstacle to avoid. He solved the problem of the sphere by puncturing its outer wall; it deflated like a punctured bladder, and vanished as if it were a flame out of fuel.

  The Shaman was furious. He was about to have his temper cooled. Darian detachedly reasoned out his primary advantage against this Shaman. The Shaman’s use of power was formidable, and his endurance considerable, but it was all oriented toward obvious, surface-visible effects - which was only logical considering he was a Shaman who also sought power among his people - when you want to discourage challenges and impress your followers, why not use the most awe- and fear-inspiring magics?

  Darian, however, was able to work beneath the surface. There were springs everywhere underground here; they accounted for part of the verdancy, part of the humidity, and were doubtless under pressure thanks to the large body of water nearby. Darian found the nearest underground reservoir, and with a few deft hand motions to help in the mental process of sculpting the channel underneath, brought it powerfully to the surface, right beneath the Shaman.

  Water blasted upward in a cold geyser, knocking the other to the ground, and soaking him in moments.

  Two can play at making holes in the earth.

  And while he was at it - in the next breath, he aerated the ground around the Shaman, creating an ear-numbing protracted thunderclap, then super-saturated the ground beneath the Shaman with water from that same geyser, turning it into a sinkhole. The Shaman predictably began to struggle, miring himself up to the waist - at which time Darian cut off the geyser’s feeding-channel, leaving the pressure to build below the surface. Another twist of the magic and Darian chased all the water out of the mud pit, leaving the Shaman embedded in rock-hard ground.

  Raven kept the Blood Bear warriors at the barricade; none got past the hedge of thorns backed by heavier pieces of tree trunk. Keisha pulled ten or twelve of Raven’s wounded to safety, mostly struck by arrows. After the first three, she got into a rhythm; wait for a lull, dash out, seize the victim by the shirt, haul him to protection. Then break off the arrowhead, pull the shaft out, stop the bleeding. Once that was done, most of her patients went grimly right back into the fray without pausing for more than a drink of water. She could hardly believe it - they must have been in terrible pain! But they didn’t seem to feel anything; as soon as she had them reasonably patched up with rough bandages and supportive bindings they grabbed another weapon and went for the barricade.

  The noise and stench were awful; metal clanging against metal, arrows piercing leather and skin, men and women screaming and shouting, punctuated with Kel’s war shrieks and the cries of the raptors - old and new sweat, blood, rancid grease, churned mud. It all overwhelmed the senses, impossible to block out. She couldn’t ignore the chaos, so she endured it, and after the tenth (or twelfth) man ran back to the lines as she finished tying off the bandages on his upper arm, she looked around for another patient and discovered to her surprise that there weren’t any.

  There were no more arrows flying into their lines; the fighting on this side of the barricade was all hand-to-hand, but now the advantage was with the defenders. They could continue to rain arrows down on the back rank of the enemy without even taking combatants from the line - the women and young boys stood off at a distance, lobbing their arrows in a high arc over the Raven lines and into the back ranks of Blood Bear. Blood Bear hadn’t managed to breach the barricade, as the thorns still held them at bay, and as bundles of thorns were broken and trampled by the sheer press of bodies, grimly determined children came dragging new ones to be shoved into place with boar-spears.

  Boar-spears - strangely enough, those were proving to give Raven a real edge. They were long enough to reach over the barricade and stab at the enemy without exposing their wielder to the thorns. The blade, long and sharp to piece a boar’s tough hide, was about the same size as the short-swords all of the fighters were using, and the iron cross-bar designed to keep the boar from coming up the shaft at the hunter made effective quillons. Anyone could use it to stab; really good fighters could use it to slash as well. Although the only fatal wounds to Blood Bear so far had been caused by arrows the spearmen were holding the line.

  But where was Wolverine?

  Keisha stood on her toes behind the shelter of her carved pole, and craned her neck to look over the embattled defenders.

  Wolverine had not moved a single pace forward. In fact, some of them looked embarrassed!

  They broke the Shaman’s promise, that’s why, she thought, astonished. Blood Bear has broken the promise the Shaman made not to attack while he and Darian were fighting. This wasn’t a case of Northerner against out-land Southerner, where anything was fair and promises didn’t matter - this was tribe against tribe, where strict rules held.

  And Blood Bear had broken the rules. No matter who survived this fight, Blood Bear had blackened the name of their tribe. Even their own totemic spirit might choose to desert them, and no tribe or individual would ever trust the word of a member of Blood Bear again. That meant no alliances, no intermarriages, no trade agreements, no intercourse of any kind. Essentially, it meant the death of the tribe. The only way a member of Blood Bear could survive the shunning would be if he somehow convinced the Chief of
another tribe that he had not participated in the oathbreaking; then he could be adopted into a new tribe.

  Which means no adult warriors of Blood Bear, period. Only the women and children. Wolverine will throw them out as soon as the fighting’s over. Skies above - I’m actually witnessing the final death of the entire clan that attacked Errold’s Grove.

  Wolverine wouldn’t raise a finger to help Raven, though. Their code of conduct didn’t extend that far.

  Another man fell, and Keisha dashed out to drag him into safety. This time her treatment took even less time; a simple slash wound, shallow, with no arrow to extract. In a few moments he was back in his place, boar-spear in both hands, punishing the man who’d managed to reach him with savage thrusts of the spear.

  One of the fighters in the rear of the Blood Bear mob pulled himself back and out of the fight; it was this movement against the flow of battle that caught her attention.

  The fighter, who by his elaborately decorated, heavy armor, was someone of high rank, whirled to face the combat between Darian and the Shaman. He grabbed a discarded bow from the ground, took an arrow from the quiver still attached to his belt, and took aim at Darian’s back.

  Keisha screamed, but her cry was lost in the general outcry. Her heart convulsed painfully, as she cried out a warning no one would ever hear -

  But someone did.

  A huge, white shape streaked from the far right of the lines, launched into the air, and sailed over the barricade with the grace of a swan in flight. It was Karles, and Shandi clung to his back, her mouth set in a taut line, her never-used sword in hand.

  Just as the warrior loosed his arrow, Karles reached him; Shandi’s sword licked out and, impossibly, deflected the arrow from its deadly flight.

  Their momentum carried them on past; the warrior put a second arrow to his bow, cursing loudly in his own tongue. But now, Shandi was not the only one who knew what he was trying to do.