The Saprano Sorceress

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Overhead, the scattered clouds were white and gray, scudding southward in a brisk cool breeze that ruffled Anna's hair as she sat on Farinelli on the outcrop—a breeze much stiffer than the barely moving air that favored the tree-lined and uneven ancient road behind her.

  The sorceress attempted to match the terrain below with the small map she held, turning it and then comparing inked images to the reality of green, and brown and gray, that stretched out to the northeast.

  Two gray stone towers—barely pinpricks above the trees—stood near the fork where the river the road had followed joined another.

  "I think that's Vult," Anna said as Alvar reined up beside her.

  "Almost a day's ride."

  Anna shook her head. "We're almost near enough now." She folded the map and replaced it in her belt wallet.

  The lancer captain frowned, then leaned forward in his saddle. After a moment, he gestured to the south. "There are the armsmen of the dark ones," added Alvar, pointing to the line of brown that rose from the valley floor, an exposed section of road no more than a league away. .

  Anna had to strain to see the dark dots that represented a long column of horse winding upward along the lower sections of the old road that would eventually reach the Defalkan group. She glanced around. The outcrop where she had reined up was just about the only clear vantage point on the road—at least that she could see.

  Farther down the road, the trees thickened enough that she would be unable to see the Ebran forces until they were practically on top of the small Defalkan force.

  "How long before they get here?" she asked.

  "A glass," opined Alvar. "Less, if they push their mounts. Should we make ready?''

  "Just a moment," the sorceress temporized. What should she do? Was she close enough?

  An even colder wind gusted out of the north, accompanied by the faintest of brass chords. Anna glanced up, and, even as she watched, the scattered clouds began to darken, to expand, massing in the north above the sharp-toothed Ostfels. On the slope below the outcrop where she sat on

  Farinelli, the suddenly stronger wind whistled through the dark firs, bending the tops of their crowns.

  "It is not dry, like Defalk." Daffyd eased his mare up beside Alvar. "Defalk was green like this once."

  Anna hoped it would be again. Her eyes went to the Ebran horse, but they seemed no nearer, and then to the sky, her ears still on the rising wind.

  "Oh…"

  Alvar glanced up, following Anna's inadvertent comment.

  The clouds, now all gray and darkening toward black moment by moment, covered more than half the sky. The late-morning sunlight dimmed as the spreading blackness cut off Anna's view of the ice-covered peaks beyond Vult to the east.

  For better or worse, Anna decided, she had lost any real options. Besides, if the Evult's magic could reach her, hers should be able to reach Vult. She hoped.

  "Players!" Anna snapped, turning Farinelli and riding back onto the road so that she faced her expedition, an expedition that seemed pitifully small compared to the endless lines of Ebran horse. "There!" She pointed back to the rocky outcrop that jutted out from the curve in the road, the spot where she had reined up shortly before and from where she had surveyed the valley. She hoped that the outcrop had a solid rock base, solid enough for what she had planned. But she had no more time, not the way the Ebrans were moving, and the black clouds massing.

  "Players!" reiterated Daffyd. "On the point, ready to play!"

  Anna motioned to the players, then turned to Alvar. "Get half the lancers down the road. I hope they won't be needed, but—"

  "Purple company! Purple company! To the standard."

  Anna hadn't seen the regency banner unfurled, but it flapped in the gusting wind that blew colder with each mo-ment, and the young armsman who bore it joined up with Alvar, then trotted down the road, followed by Defalkan lancers.

  At the edge of the road, the players struggled off their mounts, some moving stiffly, others more fluidly, all grasping for instruments.

  "Green company! Green company! Hold the uphill road! Hold the uphill road!" Alvar's voice was strong and carried, despite the whistling of the wind.

  The mounts of the purple company clattered past the dismounting players.

  "Fhurgen!" ordered Spirda. "Get the players' mounts up there! Out of the way. You too, Mysar!" The blonde subofficer rode toward Anna.

  As she dismounted, Anna handed Farinelli's reins to Spirda, then hurried out toward the end of the outcrop, trying to clear her throat. Once again, she felt like she was being hurried, caught not totally prepared, and it wasn't anyone's fault but her own stupidity.

  You idiot! Of course, the Evult would just let you ride up and try your magic! Idiot!

  Behind her, Spirda started to ease the palomino after him back up the road, following Fhurgen and Mysar. Farinelli whuffled, then neighed, sidestepping but trailing the subofficer, who slowed, then stood in the stirrups and half turned toward the sorceress, shouting, "Do you want the lutar?"

  "No. Leave it on Farinelli."

  Spirda nodded and gestured toward Fhurgen. "Tie the mounts there."

  As her guards tethered the players' mounts to a pine branch that extended along the downhill side of the road up from the outcrop, Anna stopped just short of the end of the point, running through a vocalise as she took another look at the valley and tried to clear her mind, easing the written spells from her wallet. She hadn't wanted to trust her memory totally, but she hoped she wouldn't have to look at the words, that she could focus her mind on the images she wanted to call forth.

  Evert in the space clear of the evergreens that flanked the road, the day hafl turned more like twilight as the black clouds continued to spread and churn. The wind on the point was nearly a gale that lashed around her.

  Idiot! Talk about spellcasting with disruptions!

  The players scurried into position, their eyes straying toward the darkening clouds, their hair blown by the increasingly bitter wind. Iseen blotted an eye, as though dust or grit had lodged there.

  "Warm-up song! Warm-up song!" called Daffyd, struggling with tuning pegs even as he spoke.

  Anna turned from the group and tried not to wince, either at their sounds or at the sight of the Ebran forces trotting up the road. The Ebran van had vanished into the trees, but that meant the dark riders were just that much closer. She hoped—always hoping—that Alvar could hold them off until she did what she had to—and that it worked.

  The sorceress forced herself to take a deep breath, forced herself to wait as the discord behind her began to resemble music.

  "Warm-up song—one more time!"

  Cracccckk! A single yellow lightning bolt struck the road a dek farther downhill from Anna's force, sending a faint vibration through the rocks and soil. With the lightning bolt came another of the underlying bass chords, so deep that the air groaned.

  The sorceress and regent hoped the Evult had struck his own lancers, but doubted she'd be that lucky.

  No casualties from friendly fire here. The fire isn't at all friendly, not here.

  The sorceress turned to Daffyd. "The hymn! Have them do it once—that's all the more warm-up we'll have time for."

  "The hymn… now!" Daffyd snapped, his voice rising slightly. "One and two… and…"

  The sound was ragged, but not too bad. Anna hoped— prayed—it would suffice as she turned her back to the wind, and, after clearing her throat, tried another vocalise.

  Crracck! The second lightning bolt was less than a half dek away, and the groans and rumbles were even more pronounced—and a deep, counterpointed chord, somehow harmonically dissonant, rumbled beneath everything.

  You can't have harmonic dissonance, insisted part of Anna's mind. Except in modern music, and that doesn't count here. She pushed away the thoughts.

  A blackish yellow pallor, darker than twilight, cloaked the valley, almost as though a dome had capped the area. In the deepening gloom, the long lines of mounted
Ebrans continued to ride up toward the pitifully small Defalkan contingent.

  The wind cut through Anna's leathers like a knife, and ripped her hat off her head as she turned back to the players. Her eyes followed the battered felt as it fluttered out beyond the outcrop.

  Craaacckkk!!! The blinding yellow bolt struck less than two hundred yards below the outcrop, and the hiss of stream from the river momentarily drowned out the whistling of the wind and the creaking of the firs as they bent in the wind, a wind that smelled metallic, foreign, sorcerous.

  Anna blinked away the glare and the momentary blindness and cleared her throat. "The hymn. Now!"

  "One…" shouted Daffyd, easing his viola under his chin and gesturing with the bow.

  The raggedness cleared after two bars, and Anna sang, sang as though it were the Met or Carnegie Hall or Covent Garden, with all the years of training that had never been fully utilized.

  "I have sung the terror of the power of all sounds, I am bringing forth the magma from the deeps where it resounds, I have loosed the fateful tremors of the plates beneath the grounds. My songs will smash the earth. Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia; Glory, glory, halleluia; my songs will smash the earth!

  "In the terror of the tremors, death is freed from all its locks, with a slashing through the hillsides that flattens trees and rocks. As I spelled to keep men free, let us see Vult fall in shocks. My songs will smash the earth. Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia; Glory, glory, halleluia; my songs will smash the earth!

  "With the rising of the waters, streams are loosed from all their banks, and their torrents through the hillsides will drown the darkest ranks…"

  Even before she had finished the last chorus—strophic-spell, some part of her mind insisted—that great harp behind and within the world had vibrated with a frequency so deep it felt like her bones had been jellied—harmonic, yet disharmonic.

  Crracck! The bale-yellow lightning slammed the mountainside less than a hundred yards away, and Anna started to put her hands to her ears to shut out the pain.

  Yet, powerful as the lightning was, painful as the blast of sound and energy was, she could sense a finality, a desperation. She blinked and turned back to the players.

  Daffyd held his viola and bow, staring past her toward the still-swirling and dying clouds, as if he expected the world to end.

  Iseen's mouth hung open, her horn almost dangling from her hands, and, beside her, Ristyr's eyes bulged.

  In the background, Anna could hear blades ringing, and shouts, as if through a muffled curtain. Were the Ebrans upon them?

  "The fire song! The fire song!"

  Daffyd looked blank.

  "The fire song, damn it!" Anna shrilled.

  "The fire song!" Daffyd repeated.

  The notes were more ragged, but they would have to do. There was no more time, not with all the mounted Ebrans hacking at Alvar and his lancers.

  Anna sang—sang as if it were the last song.

  '' Armsmen brown, armsmen black, not flame nor ashes shall you lack… from the strings, from the sky, fire flay you till you die!"

  Crackling bolts—golden red—flared like snapping harp strings from the still-dark clouds, whipping across the evergreens, a line of endless down-pointed fireworks raking the long road down to the valley. A second line of fire followed the first, and then a third, and fourth… until the sky seemed hatched with lines of fire.

  And yet the ground beneath heaved and groaned, and the rocks shrieked.

  Anna's arms fell to her sides, as she stood there dazed. Too battered even to wince at the screams that seemed to go on and on, too stunned to cover her ears, too flash-blinded to see what she had unleashed.

  Before her, Daffyd staggered, and two others staggered and went to their knees, as the ground rumbled and shuddered, with a shrieking grinding from deep beneath the rocks that went on and on and on.

  The rumbles and the shudders made those that had occurred around the Sorprat sinkhole seem like nothing. Small cracks ran down the middle of the narrow road, and dust puffed into the air above the cracks.

  Anna could vaguely hear horses neighing, some screaming, but those sounds were lost in the deeper shrieks and rumbles of the earth itself. The entire world seemed to vibrate, the clash of harmony and disharmony shaking the very bones of the earth.

  The sorceress shifted her weight, trying to keep from being toppled. She looked eastward toward the valley. Had the clouds stopped rising?

  Anna swayed on her feet as the earth rolled under her, and as a fissure split the bottom of the valley in a jagged line that crept uphill, back toward the river below the outcrop where she stood. Both the red glare and the heat from that chasm seared her face, and she staggered back and threw up her hand.

  A wall of flame, blue and red, wavered out of the chasm's depths, growing and fountaining with each instant, and the fallen trees vaporized into ashes as the almost living fire marched down toward the toppled gray-stone towers of Vult and up toward Anna.

  As she braced herself against the tremors that continued to shake even the solid rock of the mountain beneath her, Anna's mouth dropped open as she saw curtains of steam rise, ghostly white against the swirling black sky, from both rivers as their waters poured into the rising wall of golden red magma that welled out of the earth in dozens of spots.

  The wind dropped from a northern gale to intermittent gusts from the southeast carrying waves of chill and waves of heat, sulfur, and ozone, all swirled together, and carrying the odor of steamed vegetation and steamed meat.

  Oh Lord, no, thought the sorceress as her stomach churned at the sickening odors that she had created, as she choked back the bitter bile, and straightened, despite the needle-knives that stabbed at her eyes and the hammering through her skull.

  Down the valley, the dark pines began to fall, row by row, impossibly uphill, as though scythed by an invisible blade that left none standing.

  The screaming of a horse overrode the other cries and shrieks.

  Farinelli? Anna turned and staggered toward where she thought the palomino might be.

  WWHHHUMMMP!!!!!

  The shock wave threw Anna flat across the trail, skiddiftg her on her back toward the boulders on the mountain side of the trail.

  She struggled to her knees at the edge of the road, and lurched upward. No one else could calm Farinelli. No one.

  Another rending shriek of tortured rock bombarded her ears as the sorceress took another step through the unearthly haze of powdered rock, of steamed vegetation and fire-flayed armsmen, of dust, and sulfur, and…

  WWHHHUMMMP!!!!! WWHHHUMMMP!!!!!

  The two massive ground shudders lifted her into the air, and she half turned, throwing her hands out before her as the boulders seemed to fly toward her, ever so deliberately, ever so slowly.

  Yet she could not even find time to open her mouth before she could feel the impact, the white-fired pain cascading up her outstretched arm like the most dissonant of chords slamming through her whole body.

  Then there was silence… and darkness.

  129

  Encora, Ranuak

  "You see," offers the Matriarch. "The harmonies are re-knitting."

  "The entire world shuddered. The winds screamed, and the sea smashed the front line of shops in the harbor." Black-haired Veria frowns. "Vult is a pile of molten rock and steam. The north of Ebra is devastated, and most of Synek has been washed away by the rains and melted snow and ice. The Evult has been destroyed, as have all the dark-singers, and almost all the dark armsmen in Liedwahr. That is harmony?"

  "I would call that dissonance," says Alya coolly. "Dissonance the like of which Erde has never seen."

  "If your mother and matriarch says the harmonies are rechording," says Ulgar, "then they are."

  "Father… saying it is so does not make it so," protests Veria.

  Alya looks toward the round-faced, gray-haired woman and offers the slightest of shrugs, as if to indicate that there is l
ittle point in arguing the issue.

  "Might I point out, daughters, ever so humbly as a worthless old male whose views are doubtless beneath notice, that the soprano sorceress called upon Harmony, has attempted to rebuild Defalk, and renounced immediately any thoughts of building a dynasty. Might I also point out that the rains have begun to return to Defalk and that the sorceress has survived, while the Evult did not."

  "How long will she linger?" asks Veria.

  "She will live, and prosper. The harmonies will see to that," offers the Matriarch.

  "Mother… you keep making these grandiose statements, and you never explain."

  The Matriarch ignores the slip in salutation, instead offering a warmer smile before speaking. "The sorceress has acknowledged Defalk's debt justly, not as hers, but as one for which she assumes the responsibility." The round-faced matriarch smiles even more broadly. "Since when did either Lord Behlem or the Evult acknowledge anything? The sorceress acknowledged her debt to Lord Barjim, and she was willing to put herself in the way of dissonance. We will rebuild a few shops, and the harmonies will not fail her—or us."

  Ulgar coughs, hiding a grin with the hand that covers his mouth.

  130

  She's so good with young voices …" Young voices, young voices… what about older voices? What about opera? What about.…

  "Could you not have stopped this? You are the greatest sorceress…" Greatest sorceress… greatest sorceress… greatest sorceress…

  "I MISS YOU!!!"

  Miss you, too, littlest redhead, miss you, miss you…

  Something jolted Anna, and she moaned. She didn't mean to moan, but she did. She tried to open her eyes, but even attempting to lift her eyelids sent lances of pain through her skull, and the darkness came up and swallowed her.

  What's a furl… furl…furl?

  "There is the question of the banner." Whose banner… whose?