"So I can figure out some way to stop the Ebrans before they kill you," answered Anna. She wanted to apologize for being short with the clueless young subofficer, but she didn't. She was tired of explaining and apologizing.
"But the Prophet…"
"The counselor and the Prophet have already agreed." Anna turned to Farinelli and checked saddlebags, water bottles, and the lutar case a last time before mounting.
Daffyd scrambled into his saddle, as did Spirda.
Anna slowly eased Farinelli across the stones of the courtyard toward the portcullis gate.
Except for the half squad of duty guards, there were no armsmen moving in the tents beyond the liedburg walls. The horses in the temporary corral stood almost motionless.
Even in the meanest stretch north of liedburg, the early-morning light fell on streets that were all but deserted.
A wisp or two of smoke drifted from a handful of scattered chimneys, and Anna had to guide Farinelli to the east side of the street to avoid an enthusiastic maid dumping chamberpots. But far too many shutters were, fastened tight, or ripped open and hanging askew on iron brackets.
Spirda rode stiffly behind Anna and Daffyd, but Anna was in no mood to cheer anyone up. How could she figure out how to use a river and land to stop the dark ones? And did her inability to see Mario mean something terrible? Or that she was losing her talent for sorcery? Or that, as Brill had intimated, too much trying to see the mist worlds—her earth—would cost too much? Or start a raging blaze?
She straightened in the saddle and pushed the thoughts away. She had to do what she could do.
74
The endless sun beat down on Anna, oh the dusty road as she led the riders up the long incline from Sorprat and the ford aoross the Chean River. Sweat oozed into her hair and down onto her brow no matter how often she used the soggy square of cloth that once had resembled a handkerchief.
At the top of the incline, where the road flattened into a dusty strip heading eastward toward Mencha, Anna turned Farinelli back west for a few paces, along a narrow path wide enough for perhaps two horses. There she reined up and studied the road. The main road from Mencha and the east swung down through the cut in the hillside to the ford—essentially a stone causeway over which a handspan of brown water flowed. On the low hill on the north side of the river stood the handful of houses that represented
Sorprat. On the south side, where Anna, Daffyd, and the armsmen had reined up, the dry river bluffs were empty, except for. an abandoned stone watchtower less than fifty yards across the road from Anna. The watchtower offered a clear view of both ford and town, and the flat highway that stretched through scattered brown grass, creosote bushes, and bare reddish ground toward the eastern horizon. Anna edged Farinelli slightly closer to the bluff edge and leaned forward in the saddle, trying to study the curve of the river.
"Still waters run deep…" The song's words echoed in her thoughts and were gone. The Chean. might run smoothly, but it certainly wasn't deep, and that was part of her problem.
"Why are we headed out this way?" asked Daffyd. "No one is stupid enough to fight a battle with their backs to a cliff."
Anna wanted to glare at the player. Too often, he was still the condescending undergraduate who hadn't figured out how much he didn't know. "You're right, but I don't know the road. I need to check it out."
Daffyd looked puzzled. "Check out?"
"Look at it." Anna paused, then continued, absently patting Farinelli on the neck. "If the Prophet's forces are in Pamr, how will Eladdrin bring his troops?"
"He'll take the high road along the bluff here," answered Spirda from Anna's right. "He wouldn't want to put them on the exposed low ground down there, especially since he knows you're a sorceress. They'd be sitting geese for archers, too."
Anna would not have called the narrow dusty trail that wound westward—almost paralleling the curves of the river itself—a road, although perhaps it had been a highway once, before the rains had ceased. The trail was flat, level, and ran through low brush and brown grass, leaving any who traveled it visible for deks or leagues… or whatever. Her eyes flicked back downhill to the Chean River, a thin line of brown water almost lost in wider banks that announced it had once been far greater.
As Spirda had said, the Ebrans certainly would not wish to lead their troops downhill into the ford—even if they knew the area contained no troops.
What if Behlem drew up his forces as though to defend Pamr—a good part of a day's march farther west? With their water-scrying, the Ebrans would certainly know where the Prophet's forces were.
Anna frowned. The Ebrans could take the narrow trail that once might have been a road and follow the river to hold the high ground—and they wouldn't have to worry about mud or rain. Even so, how near would they stay to the river? She rubbed her forehead.
"Spirda? If Hanfor were leading his troops, how close would he stay to the river?''
"It's hard to say." The subofficer pursed his lips, then scratched the back of his head. "He'd want to see the river and the plain there. I don't know, but I'd bet he'd pretty much follow this road we're on. You can see riders from a long ways, and there's higher ground on this side as you get toward Pamr."
Anna looked at the bluffs—they seemed to be normal clay and soil, not sandstone or the redstone of the Ostfels. Could she turn the bluffs into something more dangerous? She remembered listening to Sandy and his endless lectures on aquifers and groundwater and sinkholes. But could she create something that the Ebrans couldn't see? Couldn't sense? Something that seemed natural even to magic sensors?
"We'll be here awhile." Anna took out the second water bottle, uncapped it, and swallowed a good third of it before she replaced it. Even with the bedraggled floppy-brimmed hat and the long-sleeved shirt, she felt the sun beating through her.
Spirda looked surprised.
"I need to do some prep work. Just make sure we're not disturbed." She slowly dismounted, handed Farinelli's reins to the subofficer, and began to unstrap the lutar.
"Daffyd?"
"Yes, Lady Anna?'' The player eased the mare over beside Spirda.
"I'm going to need some help," She pulled out several scraps of paper and the battered greasemarker that she'd lugged all across Defalk. "After I figure out the right kind of spell."
Daffyd nodded and began to dismount. Spirda gestured, and one of the other armsmen, older, black-bearded, rode closer. "Take these, Fhurgen." The subofficer handed Farinelli's reins to the bearded man. In turn, Daffyd handed the mare's reins to the older armsman. Anna set the lutar case beside the road, and began to hum, trying to match what she had in mind to the melody. She sat on a patch of ground between two bedraggled creosote bushes that seemed clear of ants and insects, pushing the hat back slightly, her back to the mid-afternoon sun.
She was probably crazy to be out in the heat, but she felt there wasn't that much time. So she just kept drinking lots of water.
The first line didn't work, and she scratched it out. "What's she doing?" whispered Fhurgen to Daffyd. The other armsmen just watched, and Anna could feel all the eyes on her. She wanted to shake her head.
"Creating a spell… I think," the player muttered back. Anna glared at them. It was hard enough without intrusions. Both men closed their mouths, but she caught the exchange of glances. More unspoken shit about moody or bitchy women. Men were creative or eccentric, but women were difficult or bitchy. She snorted, ignoring the second set of glances, forcing her thoughts back to the spell rhyme. Her neck burned by the time she had the four verses she needed scrawled out on the paper. Her knees creaked as she stood.
"All right," she said, turning her head toward Daffyd, who was blotting his sweating face. "You can tune the viola. I'm just about ready to try this."
"That's good. I'm hot."
"So am I." Her back was soaked where the shirt and tunic had rested against her skin.
As Anna brushed off her trousers, and began to tune the lutar, and Daffyd th§ vio
la, Spirda rode back toward the ford, not more than fifty yards, before announcing loudly. "There's no one coming."
Although the sorceress felt like telling Spirda that such announcements were unnecessary, that she could see that herself, she just nodded and finished tuning the lutar. Then she cleared her throat and ran through a set of vocalises. Her throat was dry, and she stopped for more water before resuming.
Finally, she turned to Daffyd again, catching him wiping his forehead. "Here's the song." She hummed the round, once, then again. "Can you do that?"
"Of course. It's a simple tune."
"I won't be playing the same thing," she pointed out. "The chords are harmony."
Daffyd nodded again, and fiddled with his bow.
The sorceress looked toward the river, cleared her throat, nodded to Daffyd, and began.
"Cut, cut, cut your bed deeply through the ground easily, easily, easily, with water yet unfound. "Leave, leave, leave the road covered by the ground…
"Carve, carve, carve deep beneath the ground…"
Despite the support of Daffyd's playing, by the time she strummed the last chord, Anna had to sit down—abruptly— on the dusty clay of the road, her head swimming, and her skull throbbing. The lutar lay beside her, and stars flashed across her eyes.
A low rumbling, or groaning, filtered up through the ground, and little puffs of dust burst upward along the road.
"Are you all right?" asked Daffyd, kneeling beside her.
"I need something to eat," she admitted. "And drink."
Fhurgen eased his mount back as Daffyd rummaged through the saddlebags of his mare before returning to Anna with a chunk of bread and her water bottle.
"Here."
First, she drank, and then began to chew the stale bread.
Spirda rode slowly back to the two. Even through the sparkles of her intermittent vision, Anna could see the sub-officer was pale.
"The river's gone. It's just gone. What did you do?"
"It's working for us," she answered, her mouth partly full. She took another long swallow of warm water. It still tasted good. She broke off another piece of bread and put it in her mouth.
The ground trembled once more. Anna smiled faintly.
"Now what, Lady Anna?" asked Spirda.
"We wait awhile." The images in front of her eyes still sparkled, and she turned to Daffyd. "I need more bread and some cheese."
He nodded and went back to the saddlebags.
Anna kept eating, as more small puffs of dust rose along the line of the road.
Daffyd's mare whinnied, and Farinelli sidestepped, drawing the reins held by Fhurgen tight. The other armsmen rode in tight circles on edgy mounts. Daffyd glanced from Anna to the armsmen and back to Anna. She had to force herself to finish all the bread and cheese. She felt like a hog. Was that the way anorexics felt—as though normal nourishment were stuffing them? Yet her dietary needs were far from normal, and she could tell she was too thin—but how on Erde could she keep eating all the time?
"You keep it up or you'll die, either from starvation or because you can't do sorcery," she mumbled to herself.
Spirda rode back and forth, to look at the river, then back to survey the sorceress and the player, then back to the river. While he rode, and Daffyd fidgeted, Anna made her way through almost another half loaf of bread before the sparkling motes before her eyes died away. She had to have been hungrier than she'd thought—either that or her spell-casting involved a great deal more than she had considered. She felt ready to retch before she felt strong enough to stand.
The faint groaning and the dust puffs continued.
In time, when she felt matters had proceeded long enough—and she had no way of knowing, but had to trust her feelings—Anna finished the water bottle and stood, lifting the lutar. Her fingers touched the gut strings once more. She nodded and looked at the younger player. "We need to do it again."
Daffyd raised both eyebrows, but extracted his viola and bow from their case.
Anna waited until he nodded, and then she cleared her throat and repeated the second version of the song that had started as a nursery-rhyme round.
"Leave, leave, leave the road covered by the ground…”
"Hold, hold, hold the road firm above the ground…"
Spirda eased his mount back toward the road cut to the ford, watching until after Anna and Daffyd had finished. Then he rode back to the waiting squad—and to Daffyd and Anna.
"The river's back, but it's even muddier," announced the subofficer.
"It may be for a while," Anna conceded. "It may be." She felt exhausted, and hoped she was up for the long ride back toward Pamr. Slowly, she walked toward Farinelli, and even more laboriously, fastened the lutar and case in place, then mounted.
"What did you do?"
"Enough, enough." She hoped it had been enough, and that it would hold, and that Eladdrin would indeed follow the course of apparent common sense. So much was based on hope, and so often hope was disappointed.
Anna took a deep breath and turned Farinelli back toward the ford and the still-shallower and-muddier Chean River. She'd have to eat again, before long, and she hoped the churning of her overstressed stomach would subside by then.
75
Looking ahead to the bridge across the river, Anna reflected that the Chean River wasn't even a river, but more like the Platte in August—a thin stream lost in wide banks cloaked in browning vegetation. Because of all the irrigation in the river valley, the Chean carried less water than it had at Sorprat.
The sorceress had not slept well the night before, perhaps because they had stopped short of Pamr and bedded down in an abandoned barn, perhaps because her digestive system was having trouble coping with all the food her sorcery demanded, or perhaps because she continued to worry about her sorcery itself. She was relying on what she felt, and after her failure to scry Mario in the mirror, she'd begun to wonder. Was sorcery as reliable as it had seemed? Had she accomplished what she had tried with the river bluffs—or was she deceiving herself? Had her earlier successes been based on her ability? Or had she been lucky? Or was sorcery just unreliable in trying to view an earth based on technology? That didn't even deal with what she knew about people. Too many in authority—like Avery or Behlem—-demanded proof for others to justify their actions, while conveniently ignoring it for their own. Proof that Virkan was abusing people, proof that Delor would have kept trying to kill her—and the only proof of that would have been her death.
There remained so much she did not know. She took a long, slow breath, and let it out equally slowly, trying to settle her churning stomach. Her eyes drifted northward, drawn by… something. She squinted as the morning sun caught the corner of her eye, but despite the glare she could see a line of armed horsemen waiting silently on the low hill above the green fields of some sort of beans.
"Lady…" said Spirda softly. "To our right…"
"I see them. Let's keep riding." The bridge wasn't that far ahead.
Anna glanced to the bridge, then back to the hill. A single rider rode slowly downhill aj an angle, so that he would cross the meadow ahead to Anna's right and meet them on the road.
"One rider," said Daffyd.
"They want something," affirmed Spirda.
Again, Anna wanted to strangle them both for stating the obvious as though she had no brains at all. Instead, she contented herself with a single word. "Obviously."
A low guffaw came from one of the armsmen riding behind. Fhurgen? Or one of the others—Hirreno, perhaps? She couldn't tell without looking, and she didn't need to, since whoever it was happened to be laughing at the self-officiousness of Daffyd and Spirda.
She checked the larger body of riders motionless on the hill beyond the irrigated bean field. They had not moved. By now, Anna, Daffyd, and the squad of armsmen were closer to the stone bridge across the Chean than to the armed riders. As they neared the mown meadow, the single rider, wearing a blue sash and bearing a white banner, trotted towar
d the squad.
"What is your pleasure, lady?" asked Spirda.
Anna studied the weathered but thin face of the man who rode ever closer. Except for reins and banner staff, his hands were empty.
"Let him close enough to speak."
The rider, clearly unsure of his reception, reined up a good twenty yards from Anna and her group.
"I bear a message for the lady Anna."
Anna eased Farinelli away from the others only slightly. "I'm Anna."
"The lord Jecks begs your indulgence and would like a word with you." The rider bowed.
"Should you?" asked Spirda. "He hasn't declared his allegiance to the Prophet."
"That might be a good reason to meet him. I talked with him before, briefly, and he seemed honest."
"Seemings are not always truths."
"I'll risk it." Anna turned to the messenger. "I'll meet him on the open meadow there. Alone. Everyone else must stay well away from us."
"No arms," hissed Spirda, behind Anna.
"I will bear no arms, except my knife, and I trust that Lord Jecks will also bear no arms."
"He will be alone." The messenger nodded. "Without his blade or bow."
"He is keeping his armsmen well beyond bow range," said Spirda. "He must want to speak with you badly."
"Very badly," added Daffyd.
Anna watched as the messenger urged his mount up the low hill and as a single rider eased away from the mounted armsmen there. As Jecks rode downhill, Anna eased Farinelli into the middle of the meadow and reined up.
The stocky white-haired rider drew up a few yards from Anna, keeping his bare hands in plain view.
Farinelli whuffled, then sidestepped.
"Easy… easy…" Anna patted his shoulder.
"Lady Anna." The white-haired man inclined his head. "I took this risk in the hopes that you would not employ your sorcery to destroy me. It is a risk, from what I hear, but at my age, you discover that everything is a risk."
The Saprano Sorceress Page 39