The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  Briana smiled up at her brother and laid her hand over his. That caused an even greater flurry. Kerrec’s eyes on her had a distinct tinge of irony. He was enjoying this, although he would never admit it.

  The crowd was still in full flutter when the emperor made his entrance. He had deliberately chosen simplicity in his attire today, putting on the uniform of a commander of legions, without the helmet or breastplate and with an empty scabbard in honor of this sacred rite. His head was bare of even the diadem. He was a plain soldier, his appearance said, preparing for a long-awaited war. He honored the festival with his presence, but he did not attempt to dominate it. That was for the riders and the gods whom they served.

  At his coming, the Hall fell silent. Everyone who had been sitting was on his feet. They all saluted him, and hailed him with drums and trumpets, roaring out his name. “Artorius! Artorius Imperator!”

  He let the shout rise to a crescendo, then raised his arms. Once again silence fell. He lowered his arms slowly and bowed to them all.

  He made no speech. That would come later. This was the hour of gods and magic.

  He remained standing as the first movement of the rite began. The chiefs and masters of the eight great orders of mages came forward at the eight points of the hall, taking stations in the first gallery.

  One by one they invoked their powers. Stone master, sea master, masters of air and fire consecrated the elements here and in the empire without. Mages of sun and moon called on their separate powers, he of the sun in his golden robes, she of the moon all in white and silver. The master of the seers blessed the eyes of every human creature in the Hall. Then last of all the Chief Augur took his place in the Augurs’ gallery, raising his staff and intoning, “In the name of Earth and Sea, Air and Fire, Sun and Moon, vision and foresight and all the senses of the body, may this rite be blessed before the gods. May our eyes be clear and our spirits unsullied. May the gods look on us with favor.”

  As he spoke, all the strands of magic in the Hall wound themselves around his staff. Briana, who knew what other workings bound that place, saw them as well, hidden beneath the rest. Together they built a structure of wards so strong that she wondered how anyone, even a mage with a master stone, could breach them.

  She kept her eye on the master of stones. Her snare was set to trap anyone who wished to harm the Dance, but it had not caught him. He was a quiet man, sturdy and foursquare, with no nonsense about him. He seemed at ease now, waiting as they all did for the ritual of warding to end and the Dance to begin.

  The Chief Augur grounded his staff in the center of the Augurs’ gallery. Seven of his colleagues arranged themselves around him. Their clerks, anonymous men in black, took places in the corners with their stacks of tablets and sharpened reed pens.

  It was a little over an hour before noon. The fog had burned away. The sun was shining through the high windows, dazzling after days of clouds and rain.

  Kerrec’s hand was still on Briana’s shoulder. It tightened to the point of pain.

  She could feel them. They were coming. The wards began ever so softly to sing.

  Valeria had been ordered to go to the stable at sunrise and wait with Sabata until it was time. Then Gothard would open a way to the Hall, and Mestre Olivet would guide her.

  She went to the stable, true enough. She brushed and curried Sabata until he gleamed, and combed out his mane and the heavy silk of his tail. She did not put on the clothes that were waiting in the feed room, the crimson coat and doeskin breeches of a rider.

  Mestre Olivet was still in the house. As far as she knew he was still asleep. Apparently he was supposed to guard her, because the wards that had been so strong were barely there. Gothard had diverted all of his energies into the assault on the Dance.

  Patterns were shifting, changing, falling into place around her. One last time, she gambled on her chances of escape. This time there was no Euan to stop her. He had gone with Gothard and the rest.

  It felt as if she were being led by the hand. She saw the people flocking toward the square, but her own path led her down nearly empty streets and through gates that opened to her touch. She suspected that she should be afraid, because she had no will in this, but when she looked into her heart she saw the stallions in their circle, white and calm.

  The last gate she passed opened on a brief interlude of green, then brought her to a door. It opened as the rest had, and led her down a dim stair to a passage underground. She could feel the weight of earth over her.

  There was magic here. The stallions protected her from it, but it was strong. It reminded her somehow of Kerrec. He had passed this way, or would pass. It was hours yet until the Dance, but the fabric of time was already growing thin.

  The passage ended below the Hall. She found herself in the colonnade near the riders’ entrance. It was not too crowded there, and most of the people seemed to be commoners dressed in their best, very plain compared to the glittering nobles in the rest of the Hall. She fit in well enough in her ordinary riding clothes.

  Gothard and his allies were outside. The Hall was woven with wards, which they were not quite ready to challenge. She must be the only person inside who knew what was coming.

  The murmur of conversation shifted and focused. She looked up with the rest of the people around her, toward the royal box under the mosaic of the Mountain. The sight of that image transfixed her. It was a long moment before she could lower her eyes to the box.

  The golden throne was empty, but a woman had come to sit in the chair beside it. Valeria knew her face, having seen it in more than one vision. She was younger than Valeria had expected, but there was no mistaking that air of quiet power. This was the imperial heir.

  There were two people behind her. One was unmistakably a guard. The other…

  Valeria’s heart went still. It must be some royal cousin who just happened, by a freak of fate, to look exactly like Kerrec—who had the same bruises, going green as they healed, and the same cuts and scars that she had seen on Kerrec’s face and hands when she sent him to the Mountain. It could not be Kerrec, here, in the place of greatest danger.

  All too clearly it was. He was on his feet and apparently sane. With so many people in between, and so much magic, she could not read him at all.

  All too slowly she understood what it meant that he was there with his hand on his sister’s shoulder. The heir knew of the plot. That meant the emperor too must know.

  Valeria’s knees started to give way. Luckily there was a pillar to lean on. Everything she had thought and feared was shifting, because Kerrec was here. Was his mind healed? She dared not send a probe through all the tangled workings in this place. All she could do was stand in the crowd and look up, and fill her eyes with his face.

  When the emperor came, she had to tear her mind away from Kerrec. Just as he had been in her visions, the emperor was a handsome man, rather less stern in the face than Kerrec was, but otherwise she could see what his son would look like in thirty years.

  Something was wrong with him. Something was missing. Something—

  When the rite of consecration began, Valeria was still struggling to understand what she had seen. The Hall was bound eightfold with magic. Its wards should have been impregnable, but there was a worm in their heart.

  Gothard, or someone in his service, had cast a working on the stones of the Hall. It was so subtle as to be almost undetectable. She only found it because she was leaning against a stone, and because she knew that Gothard must have done something to prepare the Hall for his attack.

  She looked up again to the royal box. The people in it seemed too calm. She would wager that they did not know of Gothard’s spell. Their wards were too coarse-grained—they had not caught this minute wisp of a working.

  There was no way to reach or warn them. The riders were nearly here. The sense of imminence was so powerful that she could barely see.

  She was in this place because she was meant to be. Whatever she did, she would do because i
t was inevitable, because the patterns came together just so. And, above all, because she wished to be here. This was where she had to be.

  She was almost at peace. What would come would come. She was ready for it, or she was not. Either way, it no longer mattered.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The air was singing. The sky beyond the Hall was crystalline, as if clouds and fog had never dimmed it at all. Faint but distinct, Valeria heard the sigh of the sea.

  She stood in the eye of the storm. Chaos swirled around her. Beyond the wards of the Hall, she felt a shudder of wrongness, a tear in the fabric of the world. It tasted of stone, old and cold, but this had nothing to do with Gothard. It was different.

  Barbarian. As soon as she thought the word, she knew that priests of the One God were there, raising a power that reeked of Unmaking. They were all around the palace, defended by warbands of barbarians, all of whom had come in under cover of darkness, protected by Gothard’s magic. There must have been a thousand warriors, and a score or more of priests.

  She recoiled from the knowledge of them. The spell inside her was trying to wake, rattling her badly, just when she needed to be most calm. With every scrap of will that she had, she focused away from the terrors outside and toward the ordered beauty of the Dance.

  Even that could not help her to escape. While she was lost in the world’s confusion, she had gained an escort. Gothard stood on one side of her, and Euan Rohe, barely disguised in a hooded cloak, on the other. There was no sign of Mestre Olivet.

  Gothard took her arm with feigned solicitude. His words, hissed in her ear, had nothing gentle in them. “We all owe you a debt, rider, for penetrating the wards without springing the alarm. When this is over, you’ll tell me how you did it.”

  She bit her tongue until she tasted blood, but he knew what she had been about to say. His smile was a predator’s display of armament. “When this is over,” he said, “I’ll tell you how I did it.”

  His grip on her arm was painfully tight. Euan’s, on the other side, was gentler, but it was no more likely to let her go.

  She stood still between them. Gothard’s eyes had gone to the royal box and fixed on Kerrec. His lips were a thin line.

  “Did you know?” Euan asked her, quite calmly in the circumstances.

  “Not until now,” she said.

  “I hope you’re telling the truth,” he said, “because if you aren’t, once this is over, he’ll die an ugly death.”

  “That will happen no matter what I do,” she said bleakly.

  “The bargain stands,” Euan said. “You ride the Dance, he lives.”

  “Whole? Sane?”

  Gothard’s hand was so tight that Valeria’s arm had gone numb. She ignored him. So did Euan. “Whole, sane and in your power.”

  “You have no right—” Gothard began.

  “Without her, there is no Dance,” Euan said.

  Gothard snarled soundlessly. There was nothing else he could do or say, not with people all around them and a stir beginning, a deep shift in the balance of the Hall.

  The stallions were coming. Anyone with any glimmer of magic must have been able to feel it. Gothard had gone white. Even Euan was perfectly still, as if he had heard something faint and far away but impossible to ignore.

  Valeria forgot her body’s discomfort and the trap she had placed herself in. The play of light in the hall had ceased to be random. There were patterns in the shafts of sunlight and shadow, and in the dance of motes in the light. The people crowded in the galleries were no longer separate beings. They were all one, all part of the pattern.

  The stallions came through the one gate that was not crowded with bodies. They were brighter than the sun, almost unbearable to look at, until suddenly they fell into mortal solidity. Then they were the sturdy white horses she knew so well, ridden by men with familiar faces.

  All fear was gone. Even guilt had fallen away. The Dance unfolded in her, pure and whole, as the first steps began. She knew what the second would be, and the fourth and the eighth and the fortieth. She knew where the pattern could vary, and how it could shift. She knew it all, deep inside her, as the stallions knew it.

  Gothard’s magic was a shackle, and the bargain she had made was a net of chains. She was bound and bound again.

  Even that had stopped troubling her. She had become the Dance. It would go as it must go. None of them had any choice, no matter what mortals might think.

  She looked up above the riders’ heads to the royal box. The emperor was a fading ember. His daughter was a rioting fire, as wonderful in her way as one of the Ladies. And the son, the one who had been maimed and whom she had in part healed, was—was—

  She could not describe what he was, except that he was everything. Only the white gods mattered more.

  Sabata was waiting. In this hour, mortal distance meant nothing. He was there beside her, although their bodies were half a city apart. When the moment came, he would know. Then she would do what she must do.

  Step by step the patterns came together. Moment by moment she prepared herself. Dimly she was aware that Gothard had let her go. Euan had not, but he was part of her somehow. He did not trouble her, not just then.

  The Unmaking was still hovering. The priests were controlling it, with difficulty. She bent an edge of the pattern toward it to surround it and hold it back.

  The Dance approached its climax. Eight stallions wove and rewove in a skein of flashing legs and shimmering tails. The words for what they did were like incantations. Four-tempis, two-tempis, one-tempis. Travers, renvers. Passage, piaffe, pirouette. As they wound together in a circle, four more emerged into the light.

  These were the strong ones, the great dancers, the lords of the powers of air. Their strength was tightly leashed. First Riders rode them—and the Master himself, because Kerrec could not be there.

  Until now there had been no music but the air’s own singing and the soft thudding of hooves in the sand. As the Great Ones came out, a drum began to beat in a slow, pulsing rhythm.

  That rhythm was the beat of a stallion’s heart. Valeria found herself breathing in time with it. The circle of stallions opened to admit the great dancers, then closed again, cantering in slow cadence around and around. Inside the circle, the Great Ones came to a halt, each at a quarter of the circle, north and south and east and west, earth and water and fire and air.

  For a long moment they stood still. Then they began to dance.

  Great haunches lowered. Heavy necks arched and raised. One of them snorted softly. As if that had been a signal, they each began the piaffe, which the untutored would call a trot in place, but it was much more potent than that.

  Each deliberate step called up power. The earth below, the air above, came together in those gleaming bodies. They were living fire, supple as water. With each step, their haunches sank deeper and their necks rose higher, and they came closer to taking flight.

  At the moment when the great dancers left the ground, the Dance would poise at the crux. Then it could be altered. Then the tides of time would turn, and a mortal hand could shift them toward a new course.

  The first stallion quickened his pace. The muscles of his back and haunches rippled, gathering for the leap.

  In the instant before he went airborne, the blow fell. The Unmaking roared in from without. Inside the Hall, Gothard unveiled the master stone and raised it above his head. Its core was darkness visible.

  The wards of the Hall screamed. The earth shook. Darkness swirled around the sun. The walls of time shivered and cracked. The stallions went mad.

  The Hall itself fought against chaos. A net of wards held the stones together and shielded the people against the raw chaos that had erupted around them.

  In those wards were traps. They snapped shut around Gothard, Euan and a circle of men scattered around the Hall, mages all, either of stones or of the Unmaking. At the same instant, mages of the imperial orders rose up, calling together what power they had and feeding it into the w
ards.

  Gothard laughed. He had made no move to escape. The master stone began to hum.

  The more strongly the wards focused on it, the more the stone absorbed their power. Already their edges were fraying, the outer reaches weakening. The Unmaking waited beyond. When the wards were gone and the makers of the wards consumed, it would rule.

  The emperor sagged on his throne. His daughter’s face was white. She looked as if she could not move at all. All the strands of the wards came into her hands, and all her power was focused on them.

  Valeria could not see Kerrec. The emperor and his heir were caught in sunlight, but everything around them was dark.

  The Dance was broken. White shapes whirled out of control. Riders had fallen or clung helplessly to their maddened stallions.

  And yet they still, however wild, kept to the shape of a circle. The four great dancers were still in their places, riderless, rearing and clawing air, but their hind feet had not left the ground.

  In the center of the circle, darkness gathered. Its heart was a point of light.

  That light was all the hope there was. People were stampeding, screaming, dying—falling down stairs and crushed against barred doors. Mage fought mage across the galleries. Bolts of power fell on the innocent or the hapless, and wounded or destroyed them.

  Valeria turned her body and mind away from chaos and focused on the pinpoint of light. Suddenly it bloomed.

  Sabata stood in the center of the circle. As he raised his head, his eye caught and held her. His nostrils fluttered, calling to her as a mare calls to her foal.

  Even if Valeria had wanted to resist, she could not. She left Gothard gleefully destroying his family’s magic, and Euan laying himself wide open to the Unmaking, which he called the One God.

  There was a low wall between the colonnade and the arena. The wall was warded. Neither stone nor magic resisted her. She set foot on the sand.

  She had expected to stagger with the power coming up from below, but it was no worse here than in the colonnade. The circle of stallions spun, a deadly whirl of hooves and teeth. She saw a pattern in it, and a gap. It was narrow and closing fast.