A dozen small, hardy brown hens and one white-feathered cock pecked around the cottage, taking advantage of the relative warmth. A long-legged goat with a tawny coat stood in the sun and gazed, with a meditative expression, into the empty vistas below the cottage. Above the cottage, clinging to a broken edge of stone and singing in a voice that rose through the still air like sparks from a bonfire, perched a bird.
The bird was about the size of a common jay, the gray-and-black jay that sometimes ventured up to these high meadows. But this bird was not a jay, nor anything like one. It was feathered in fire. Its head was orange, with black streaked like ash above its black eyes. Its breast was gold, its wings orange and crimson, the long trailing feathers of its tail crimson and gold. When it sang, its throat vibrated and sparks showered down across the ice that glittered on the stone below its perch. When it flew, which it did suddenly, darting high into the sky and then down again and away to the east and north, flames scattered through the air from the wind of its wings.
The bird did not come to the cottage every day. But sometimes, especially on afternoons such as this, when the air was brilliant and still as glass, it came to sing for him. Jos, who had few visitors, liked to think the bird scattered luck as well as fire from its wings. He regarded any day on which it appeared as a lucky day. And he thought, pausing with his hands full of grain to throw out for the hens, that luck would be a good thing, today.
Far down below the cottage, yet well within sight, stood one end of the Great Wall. Jos thought of it that way: the Great Wall. It was impossible not to set that kind of emphasis on it, if you looked down upon it on every clear day. The Wall dominated his world, even more than the jagged peaks of these wild mountains. It was made of massive granite blocks carved out of the heart of a mountain… more than one mountain, for this Wall wove its way from this place to the other end that anchored it, two hundred miles or more to the east. South of the Great Wall lay the wild wooded hills and great fertile plains and rich, crowded cities of Casmantium, where Jos had been born. To the north lay the desert.
The griffins’ desert was nothing in size compared to Casmantium, but from Jos’s vantage, looking down on both simultaneously, this was not perceptible. The desert ran down the far slopes of the mountains and then away farther than sight could discern: red sand and knife-edged red stone; molten light thick as honey and heavy as gold; winds that hissed with sand and flickered with fire. The northern face of the Wall, its desert side, burned with a hard, brilliant flame so bright it was painful to look directly at it. The other face… on the side of earth, the Wall was glazed with ice and veiled with mist. Above the Wall, all the way to the vault of the sky, the air shimmered, for the Wall was more than a physical barrier. It barred the passage of any winged creature of fire or earth as thoroughly as it barred those that were land-bound.
At two points, where the Wall had cracked through, massive clouds of white steam billowed up into the sky.
Judging by the amount of steam, the cracks had not gotten any worse today, Jos estimated. Or not much worse. Was that luck? Or had Kes found something better to do on this day than pry at the cracks, try to pull down the Great Wall, try to burn through to the country of earth? He peered carefully into the burning sky above the country of fire, but he could see no griffins riding their hot, dangerous winds. Perhaps they had all allowed those winds to carry them back into the heart of their own country. Perhaps Kes had gone with them. Perhaps Kes had called up that wind, a wind that would lead her adopted people away from the Wall that constrained them…
More likely the griffins had simply caught sight of a herd of fire-deer and allowed themselves to be distracted. Most likely they would come back soon. If not before sundown, then probably tomorrow.
And even without Kes or her companion mages pushing at the Wall, Jos thought the cracks would probably get worse. He was almost certain they had been worse this dawn than last night’s dusk. Damage that worsened overnight was probably not due to the griffins’ mages.
Jos only wished he knew what had caused the damage in the first place, what was still causing more damage every day. And, of course, he might wish as well that knowing what had caused the problem would let him see how it might be fixed. That was a separate issue.
There was a ripple in the air, a shift in the light, and Kairaithin was suddenly present, lying on the high winds, far above. His shadow swept across the meadow, brilliant and fiery-hot.
In his true form, Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin was a great-winged griffin, not the most beautiful griffin Jos knew, but one of the greatest and most terrible. He was a very dark griffin. Black feathers ran down from his savage eagle’s head and ruffled out in a thick mane around his shoulders and chest. His black wings were edged and barred with narrow flickers of ember-red. They tilted to catch the wind, shedding droplets of fire into the chilly mountain air. His lion pelt was a shade darker than crimson, his talons and lion claws black as iron.
The chickens scattered beneath his fiery shadow, squawking in desperate terror, heads ducked low and wings fluttering. The goat, wiser than the chickens, bolted straight through the door into the cottage where it would, judging from past experience, crowd itself under the bed.
Jos tilted his head back to watch the griffin come down through the thin air—air imbued with the natural, wild magic of the mountains and the river. No griffins but this one could come to this place. That was why the Wall had been allowed to end down below: because it ran out into thin, cold air and wild magic inimical to griffin fire, and no griffin could simply pass around its end. Except this one. Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin seemed to have no difficulty going wherever he chose, whether in the country of fire or the country of earth or this wild country that belonged to neither.
Kairaithin landed neatly in the middle of the tiny meadow. Heat radiated from him. In his shadow, the delicate grasses withered. But in the rest of the meadow, flowers opened and tilted their sensitive faces toward the griffin’s warmth as toward the sun.
Jos said mildly, “If you would come in your human form, I would not need to spend hours prying the goat out of my house and collecting terrified chickens.”
Kairaithin tucked himself into a neat sitting posture like a cat, tail curled around his eagle talons. He tilted his head to one side, the mountain light glancing off his savage-edged beak as off polished metal. He said, Have you other pressing amusements with which to occupy your hours?
A joke. At least, Jos thought that question had probably been intended as a joke. Sometimes griffin humor seemed a little obscure to an ordinary man. He said after a moment, “Well. Little enough, I suppose, except for watching the Wall.”
The griffin’s eyes were black, pitiless as the desert sun or the mountain cold or a fall from a bitter height. But they could glint with a kind of hard humor. They did now. The griffin said, One hopes observing the wall is not an activity that calls for your constant attention.
Jos said straight-faced, “I suppose I might be able to spare an hour from my scrutiny.” Then he added, much more tentatively, “The damage seems very little worse today than it did yesterday. Do you think perhaps the cracks through the Wall are becoming more stable?”
The griffin did not answer this, which might mean that he was uncertain or might mean that he thought not, but probably meant that he did not wish to dwell on a false hope. He asked, Kes?
“She has not come today.” To the endmost block, Jos meant, the block that anchored this end of the Wall—the block that was most seriously cracked. Once, he would have meant, She has not come here to speak to me. He did not have to say that, now. Now, she never came to the cottage or to Jos. She ventured up into the mountains only to cast fire against the Wall, to try to shatter the stone or throw it down.
Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike? Ashairiikiu Ruuanse Tekainiike?
Ruuanse Tekainiike was a young griffin mage, hardly more than a kiinukaile, a student. Griffins might be students for a long time or a short time, and became ful
l mages and no one’s subordinate, as Jos understood it, simply by waking up one morning and declaring themselves masters. Ruuanse Tekainiike was not a student because he admitted no master, but he was in no way Kairaithin’s equal. He did not worry Jos at all. Or very little.
Opailikiita was different. Opailikiita was a young griffin as well; she, too, was nothing like as powerful as Kairaithin, though Jos had reason enough to respect her power. But, much more important, she was a particular friend to Kes. Iskarianere was the griffin term for it—like sisters. Jos knew the word, though he was aware he had only a dim idea of its true meaning.
But then, as Jos also knew, griffins had only the dimmest idea of human concepts like friendship and love. He said, “Not them either.”
Kairaithin was silent for a time, gazing down from the little meadow toward the Wall. The sun had slid down past the tips of the highest mountains, so that great shadows lay in the valleys in the lee of the mountains. The temperature was already falling—or would be, if not for Kairaithin’s presence in the meadow. Alpine bees made their determined way from flower to flower, taking advantage of the warmth the griffin had brought into their meadow. Jos wondered whether the griffin’s presence was, on balance, useful or detrimental to the meadow. He might shed warmth and light all about, but those grasses and flowers his shadow had burned would be a long time recovering.
Of course, if the Wall shattered, a little patch of burned grasses in a high meadow would be very far from the worst problem they would all face.
Bertaud son of Boudan is coming here, said Kairaithin, still gazing downhill. Your king is coming with him.
“Here?” Jos was dismayed—then he asked himself, Why dismay? On his own account, or merely at the thought of his silent mountains being overrun by the king and his company? Either way, he smothered that first sharp reaction and asked instead, “Why? I mean, what do they expect to do?” Something useful? He could not imagine what.
The griffin’s long lion-tail tapped once, twice, on the ground at his feet. Though he had been acquainted with Kairaithin for some years, and on tolerably good terms for several of those years, Jos could not guess whether that movement signified annoyance or satisfaction or nervousness or predatory intent or something else entirely. When Kairaithin spoke, he could recognize nothing in his voice but a strange kind of patient anger, and that had informed the griffin for as long as Jos could remember—since the Wall, indeed. Which Kairaithin had helped to build, after which he’d been cast out by his own people. Jos knew little more about it than that, for the griffin had never spoken of it. But he thought he understood Kairaithin’s anger. What he did not understand was the patience.
I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan, Kairaithin said. I, as though I were a courier, bearing a white wand and the authority of your king.
The idea of the griffin as an official Feierabianden courier made Jos smile. He turned his head to hide his expression. In Feierabiand, nearly all the royal couriers were girls of decent but not high birth; they tended to form a tight-knit alliance, married one another’s brothers and cousins when they retired from active service, and brought up their daughters to be couriers as well. And they were all, that Jos had ever met, passionately proud of their calling. However Kairaithin viewed the service he had performed—and it seemed both a wise and a very small service, to this point—Jos thought he understood the griffin well enough to be certain he was not proud of it.
Jos wondered whether Kairaithin was, in fact, ashamed of his role in building the Wall, whether he was ashamed of once again defying the will of his people in carrying word of the damage to the Wall to human authorities. If he were a man rather than a griffin, that was a question that Jos—Jos in particular, all things considered—might even have found a way to ask him. But even when he wore the shape of a man, Kairaithin was nothing like a man. Jos could not imagine a way to pose such a question to the fierce, proud, incomprehensible griffin, whatever shape he wore. He said instead, “When will they get here?”
The griffin turned his narrow eagle’s head to look at Jos.
He was angry, Jos realized. The griffin’s black gaze was so powerful he half expected the granite of the mountain to crack and shatter under that stare. Jos stopped himself from taking a step backward by a plain act of will. It helped that he was sure—well, almost sure—that the griffin was not angry with him.
Soon, said Kairaithin. Within the hour.
“Oh.” Jos hadn’t realized that when the griffin said King Iaor and Lord Bertaud were coming, he meant right now. He glanced uncertainly around the meadow, down the slope where riders might come at any moment around the corner of the mountain. He did not know what Kairaithin had in mind, but he was almost completely certain that he did not want to meet the king or Bertaud or anyone in their party. “I could go… I could go somewhere, I suppose.” Though he did not know where. He would need the shelter of the cottage at dusk…
You will stay here. You will speak for me, said the griffin.
Jos stared at him. “I will? What would I possibly say?”
What occurs to you to say. But Kairaithin paused then, and Jos realized he was not as arrogant as that command had made him seem; that he was, in some way, actually uncertain. He said, Bertaud son of Boudan knows me… as well as any man. But you have gazed down at that Wall from almost the time it was made, and you know it well. And you know Kes.
“Not anymore,” said Jos grimly.
As well as any creature living. Better, I believe, than I. In some ways, better even than her iskarianere. I wish you to explain what you know to the king of men and to his people. It is better for a man to speak to men.
The belief that the King of Feierabiand would listen to Jos, of all men living, showed a certain wild optimism coupled with a complete lack of understanding of the way men made decisions. Or possibly, Jos realized bleakly, it showed an accurate assessment of how dangerous matters were, that Kairaithin considered that, regardless of all else, the King of Feierabiand would indeed feel himself compelled to listen respectfully to a Casmantian spy—an ex-Casmantian spy, a traitor to his own king, a man who had betrayed his own people for the sake of a Feierabianden girl. And—to cap the tale—a man who had then not even managed to keep the girl.
Iaor Daveien Behanad Safiad was not an overtall man, nor overbroad, nor did he care to make an excessive display, except now and then and to produce a specific effect, at court—usually at his more formal summer court, in high northern Tiearanan. Or so Jos had heard, long ago, when he had heard everything from everyone. Then, poised at a small, neat inn at Minas Ford, on the road that led from Terabiand on the coast up the length of Feierabiand to graceful Tiearanan, he had been so placed as to hear and overhear both the most urgent tidings from the indiscreet servants of important lords and merchants and the most trivial gossip from farmers’ wives and the servants of courtiers. Though Jos was generally quiet himself, other men tended to speak freely in his presence. This was a natural gift that had served him well… until the time came when he had been commanded to definitively act against Feierabiand, and chose not to. For Kes’s sake.
He hardly remembered the state of mind and heart that had driven him at that time.
But he remembered Iaor Safiad, who, though he was not an exceptionally big man and though he made no great display, nevertheless drew the eye. And he remembered Lord Bertaud, the king’s servant and friend, whom Jos had once gone out of his way to mislead regarding the number and disposition of the griffins that had come into Feierabiand… None of that had ended in any way as Jos or his master in the Casmantian spy network had expected. No. Events had unrolled down a different path. Because of Kes. Who now was still driving events, and still in no manner anyone could have foreseen.
Jos strongly suspected that neither King Iaor nor Lord Bertaud had forgotten him, or the role he had played—the role he had tried to play. No more than he’d forgotten them.
And Kairaithin thought he could speak to those men?
&n
bsp; Jos stood in front of his cottage, his arms crossed uneasily across his chest, watching the riders come around the curve of the mountain. Kairaithin lounged near at hand, his great catlike body curved in a comfortable, relaxed pose against a shining granite cliff. Above him, sheets of ice became, under the griffin’s influence, plumes of mist. Jos was grateful for his supportive presence, but he knew that Kairaithin’s relaxed pose was an illusion—though it was a good pose and he was not quite certain how he could tell it was false. Nor did he understand the griffin’s tension. Kings and lords, all the formal titles of men, what did they mean to a griffin? To one of the most powerful of all griffins; a griffin mage who, exile or no, undoubtedly still cast even his own former students thoroughly in the shade?
Nevertheless, Jos knew that Kairaithin was tense. The knowledge made him anxious in his turn. He had had a lot of practice, once, in masking his thoughts and emotions from the eyes of men. He hoped he had not lost the knack of it.
Iaor had brought only half a dozen men, besides Lord Bertaud. Well, that was reasonable. They had come merely to look at the Great Wall, Jos presumed, and getting an army up into these rugged mountains would be a nightmare. If it could be done at all. This broken rock where the nameless river had its birth might be called a pass, but that was nearly a courtesy term rather than a strictly accurate description. One could get horses less than a third of the way, and to get all the way up to this high meadow, even mules needed considerable luck, shoes made specially by the best makers to provide better grip, and perfect weather. Jos tried to work out the logistics that would be required to bring an actual army through these mountains and gave up at once. Definitely a nightmare.
Probably King Iaor hoped that looking was all he and his people would be required to do. They would come up to this vantage, look down at the Wall, and worry over the cracks where the steam plumed out into the air. But then they would find that the cracks after all grew no worse. That the damage, whatever had caused it, had ceased. That the Wall would after all hold for a hundred years, or a thousand, and that no one now living would need to concern himself about the antipathy between fire and earth because the two would not, in this age, come actively into conflict. That was probably what they hoped. Jos had no conviction that they would discover any such happy outcome. He certainly could not give them any reassurance.
Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three Page 17