He was scared to death.
Harrier had said—all along—that all they had to do was survive long enough for someone else to notice that Ahairan was loose, because if they could manage to do that, someone else could stop her. He’d clung to that one fact, using it to keep himself—to keep all of them—alive for as long as he could.
But it wasn’t true.
It wasn’t even that no help was coming.
It was that there was no help out there.
Anywhere.
Seventeen
Catch Fire, Draw Flame
EACH DAY’S DAWN was like new chains of iron bound about his soul, and that none of the men and women in Bisochim’s care looked upon him with reproach was a knife in his heart. Even the northern Wildmage who had once gazed at him with eyes of hatred and loathing. Even the northern High Mage whose Elvenforged destiny had been to seek his death. Even they did not hate.
It was the bitterest irony to be found between Sand and Star that he longed now as ardently for death as he had once yearned for immortality. Death was easy to find upon the sands of the Isvai—never more so than now—but to accept that dark gift would doom his dearest love and the thousands of lives he held within his grasp. That the moment must inevitably come when all—Isvaieni, Saravasse, he himself—went down into death and despair was an unbearable thing, and so Bisochim sought to delay that which he yearned to embrace as ardently as other men might long for food, for water, for sleep, for the arms of a loved one. He did not seek death to escape pain, or out of fear of what Ahairan would do in the moment of her inevitable victory, or as an atonement for the blood upon his hands.
He sought death because in death he would no longer remember what he had done.
His every waking breath was haunted by memories of a life spent in service to arrogance and pride. Seeking to serve the Wild Magic—but only in ways that pleased him. His power had been great, his spells powerful—and so he had chosen to hide himself from the people he had been given his Three Books to serve. Instead of dedicating his life to their care, instead of rejoicing in Saravasse and their love, he had sought other matters to occupy his mind, and so arrogance had led to indolence. Instead of seeing Saravasse’s arrival as a gift from the Wild Magic that would allow him to journey to the Elven Lands to place his fears and uncertainties in the hands of the Elder Kin—they of long sight and long memory—in the flower of his pride he had stolen her will and her power and used them to conjure up monsters.
And so had lost all. Happiness. Honor. Life. This long journey was only a waking death, through which he must drag himself day upon day, watching new horrors visited upon those who would not complain of them as they suffered and starved and died. The only mercy he had been granted was that he had been spared the need to watch the children of his people die.
So far.
What virtue of concealment and defense could a fortress hold when she who wished to assault it knew where it lay? When Ahairan held within the compass of her hand creatures impervious to spellcraft? If he could not turn back the Black Salaawa—or the Goblins, or the Shamblers—by spells of command, then surely Ahairan could send them against Abi’Abadshar. One hunting pack of the Black Dogs, one infestation of poison-spitting Goblins, a new-made army of the unquiet dead, could slay the precious hundreds who thought that the ancient city of the Oldest Kin was a true refuge.
And even if Ahairan sent no armies against them, in another wheel of the seasons, they would begin to starve.
He did not speak of these things save to Saravasse, and that only in the deepest hours of the night when there were no other ears to hear. He would not render the burden of any man or woman here heavier by the weight of so much as a grain of sand.
But there were days without number when the effort of remaining silent took nearly all his strength. Those days were terrible enough. Far worse were those when the temptation coiled around his heart and mind like the desert adder: to Heal his Bonded, to end her pain—
To doom them all.
He knew he must not.
But her suffering was nigh-unbearable to him, even more for the quiet grace with which she bore it, the love she showed him when his mind was so choked with horror that he could not even speak.
Better by far to slay himself, and end her suffering that way. (If only thousands would not be condemned to slow death by his actions.) If only his death would not open another door to Ahairan’s victory, for Harrier of the Two Swords had said that they must all keep her mind upon them here in the Isvai, so that warning of her presence could spread itself through the north by the will of the Wild Magic.
And so Bisochim endured. Speaking little. Aware of less. Moving through the long days and longer nights in a haze of anguish, knowing that the power he had once gloried in could do nothing more than condemn his people to a long torturous dying.
And at last the Isvaieni came to Sapthiruk Oasis.
Oasis it had been once, but no longer. When he had first woven his web of lies to entangle the Isvaieni, Bisochim had turned the ever-flowing desert spring into a vast lake, and caused hectares of meadow to spread themselves about it as if it were a garden of the Cold North. Now nothing remained here save the drifting sand.
But the power of a Dragonbond Mage was yet Bisochim’s to command, and in the sennights of their journey to this place, Harrier of the Two Swords had said many times what he would have Sapthiruk become. And so, in the cold dawn of the day after they had reached Sapthiruk at last, Bisochim strode forth onto the sand and stretched out his hands. The winds rose at his command, swirling and blowing, and when they ceased to swirl and blow, he had surrounded five thousand hectares of desert with a wall of magic-fused stone thirty trayas thick and thirty trayas high—a wall taller than a dozen tall men and as wide as it was tall. It had two openings: one to the east and one to the north, each as wide as it was tall and each wide enough to allow three shotors to pass through it walking side-by-side.
When he had built his walls, Bisochim walked through the northern gate, onto ground swept bare by his winds, and he bespelled all that he had made. The walls of pale sandstone he warded so that no Goblin could pass through them. The ground encircled by his walls he warded so that no Goblin nor any Darkspawn creature could rise up through it. The air above the compass of the walls he warded so that no atish’ban creature could fly down through it, and the gateways in the walls he warded so that no atish’ban creature could creep in through them. And when he had done all that, Bisochim walked to the center of the land encircled by the fortress, to the place where there was no more than a scrubbed bowl in the earth where once a lake had been. And once more he stretched out his hand.
Here the water awaited his call, though its path up from the Deep Earth was choked and clogged by sifted sand. The sun moved by slow handspans across the sky as he coaxed and summoned, demanded and begged. And at last water bubbled up out of the Deep Earth, clear and pure and cold and unfailing, to make once more the great water that he had put here in the early days of his madness. Lakes and rivers and wells and springs in the farthest north and the uttermost east would fail before the oasis at Sapthiruk would go dry again.
But it was still not enough.
Sapthiruk must become a garden to rival the gardens at Telinchechitl.
And so he turned, and walked out through the gate again.
Now came within the walls of Sapthiruk a hundred chosen Isvaieni and Harrier of the Two Swords. They brought the precious baskets of hoarded seed and grain, the baskets of hoarded desert grasses and animal dung, and tent-stakes, and hammers, and leather buckets.
As Harrier of the Two Swords entered, walking down the long passage that led through the wall, he smoothed his hand along the wall that Bisochim had crafted of sand and magic and nodded, as if he found it good. He wore the Blue Robes lightly, as if they did not weigh heavily upon him, yet Bisochim had found them always to be the heaviest of garments, as if they were woven of iron and bronze, not wool and linen.
“Not clay alone,” Shaiara of the Nalzindar answered, gesturing to the baskets the shotors had carried across the distance that lay between the encampment and Sapthiruk.
BISOCHIM stood aside as they toiled, bringing water to the hard earth to soften it, digging it to loosen it, depositing their precious cargo. They began at the edge of his great water, and where they placed tufts of withered seedlings into carefully crafted mudholes, the Wild Magic brought them to life. They grew up, sent taproots questing out beneath the earth, sent up new shoots to break through the earth elsewhere, and as they did, his magic awakened the buried rootlings that remained here after the atish’ban-khazdara’s depredations. But grass was no test of his magic—all knew he could make the desert grass grow up as he chose—nor was it safety for his people. Twenty trayas from the edge of the great water, Zanattar of the Lanzanur was carefully burying dried dates. His face was turned away, but Bisochim needed no art to know what lay in Zanattar’s heart. To raise up the great trees that had once shaded Sapthiruk’s oasis, from the fruits they had managed to carry with them for so long, would be a promise tendered by the Wild Magic that the other seeds and grains they had borne with them through long privation would take root as well.
All the earth about the oasis was muddy now, and the Isvaieni toiled on, carefully piecing out the flourishing grasses to plant root-clusters in the bare spaces. Others had moved further away—under Harrier and Shaiara’s direction—marking out and preparing the ground. Here for oats and there for barley. Here would go the olive trees, there the fig trees, the naranjes and limuns, and beyond them an apple orchard.
If it could be done at all.
As Bisochim bent his spells to the work of making the date palms rise up, all who labored here beneath the desert sun stopped to watch. There was a muffled thud from the wall, and the ground trembled; Saravasse had sprung to the top of the wall to watch over him. At first there was nothing to see at all, and then—both swiftly and slowly—twelve pale green shoots rose up from the wet and richly dunged piles of heaped-up earth, rising toward the sky, spreading their wide-ribbed leaves. Darker grew the leaves, and the trunks broadened, roughened, darkened to brown. When the palms were twice the height of a tall man, Bisochim released the spell that hastened their growth and sank to his knees in the soft wet clay.
“My love!”
He heard Saravasse call out to him in alarm. Heard the sound of running feet.
“Hey,” Harrier said, kneeling before him. “Hey. You all right?”
The ways of northerner speech fell oddly upon the ear. Saravasse agreed that it was true that Northerners never said what they meant, and even though in comparison to the Elder Kin they were blunt to the point of discourtesy, one could always understand the meaning of the speech of the Elder Kin, and one could rarely understand the meaning of northerner words. But here and now, Bisochim knew that worry and concern was meant.
“I am well,” he said slowly. “I have crafted many spells today. There is still much to do.” He began to raise himself tiredly to his feet, only to find—to his surprise—that Harrier was ready with a steadying hand.
“Sure there is,” Harrier said. “But you don’t have to do it all in the next chime. Rest while we get the rest of this stuff planted. Drink something. Have that lazy dragon of yours make you some shade.”
“Lazy!” Saravasse said—and how he rejoiced and mourned to hear her voice once more as she had spoken in the child-time of their love—“I like that. You wouldn’t have any of this without me.”
“And you’re going to be very well fed for you’re trouble, Gentle’dy Saravasse,” Harrier replied, “so don’t glare at me.”
IT was four handspans before their meager stores of grain and fruit were planted. Bisochim had sat beneath Saravasse’s wing the whole time, drinking the cool fresh water of Sapthiruk and regaining his strength, for what he must do next was crucial. Only a few fruits of each ripening of the trees need be returned to the earth to extend the orchards, but their stores of grain must be doubled and redoubled, the whole of the first harvests sown back into the earth, or there would not be sufficient to feed the people. It was for this reason that Harrier of the Two Swords wished it done before all the people were there to see, yet it was also a thing to be done quickly, for the people must be brought to safety before darkness fell. Even now they waited without, in the shelter of the wall, the shotors laden, so that they might hasten within at the first sign of threat.
When Harrier and Ummara Shaiara and chaharum Kamar and Zanattar came to escort him to the place where their hoped-for orchards and fields lay, Sapthiruk itself looked nearly as it should—a great water edged by palm trees, surrounded by hardy thick-growing clumps of desert grass.
But it was not enough. He knew that nothing would ever be enough to cleanse his spirit of the stain of blindness and pride. And as dreadful as it was to have loosed Ahairan upon the world, what was infinitely more dreadful still was that thing that he dared to contemplate but rarely: that the actions he had taken in the name of an evil day served a good end now. Had he not slain all the Blue Robes of the Madiran—Had Zanattar not learned all the arts of war—Had the String of Pearls not been utterly destroyed—
He knew that without all those things Ahairan would have triumphed already. And he did not wish to know.
All the other workers waited ready, standing at the edges of lines scratched into the desert with a sword’s blade. Bisochim came and stood among them, and he saw how even though he did not wear the Blue Robes, their eyes did not look upon him out of deference and their shadows did not fall upon him out of respect. And these marks of respect to one who had cast away all right to them was as hot coals laid upon his tongue and a thorn of fire in his heart, but Bisochim would not speak these words aloud, for this was the only penance he allowed himself. He stood among them and flung out his magic over field and orchard-to-be, and the green shoots sprang up through the broken earth, and Saravasse called out to them to bring water, and many hands poured forth water onto the thirsty earth.
And while the trees were yet young saplings, the first grain stood in the field ripe and golden, and the Isvaieni who saw it happen wept, and cheered, and hugged one another for the joy of the sight. And many hands went forth into the tiny field to cut the stalks, to rub the grains free, to scatter handfuls of seed grain upon the next place prepared, to strew as many handfuls upon the stubble of the reaped field, to carry their buckets back to Sapthiruk to soak down the broken clay that would soon become earth.
Three times did Bisochim raise up a field of standing grain within the space of a few minutes. Three times did the Isvaieni return every grain of it back to the soil once more.
“I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m not hacking my way through any more . . . grass,” Harrier announced. “And I think the fruit in the orchard is finally ripe. So let’s get everybody in here and get camp set up. And someone else can do this farming stuff for a while.”
“Shall I tell them that, Harrier?” Saravasse asked.
“Oh, by all means, do,” Harrier answered.
UNREAL. That’s what Sapthiruk Oasis is, Tiercel decided. Unreal.
It was warmer inside the walls than it was ouside at night because the thick sandstone walls retained the heat of the animals and the people. It was cooler inside than out during the day, because the trees gave shade. The oasis was so much larger than the nightsprings or the largest body of water that most of the Isvaieni had ever seen that even the Nalzindar were extravagant in their use of water. Eugens and Kave had both insisted on trying to shave the night they’d arrived here. It hadn’t worked out well at all, and Harrier had just laughed at them for their efforts.
Since Harrier had returned from tracking the Armethaliehans—and Ciniran
had died, something Tiercel still tried not to think about—Kave, Eugens, and Magistrate Perizel had moved into the main tent. Tiercel really couldn’t get used to calling her “Helafin,” even though Harrier had told her bluntly that titles of rank were reserved here for the leaders of tribes, so she could choose whether she would prefer them to call her “Helafin” or “Perizel.” Whatever name she was known by, she was being pretty much a dead weight (though a quiet dead weight). Kave was cheerful, and pleasant, and did everything anyone asked him to do quickly and without complaint, but it was barely a sennight since Lord Felocan and the other four had stolen out of the camp and not come back, and Tiercel thought that their deaths, coupled with the discovery that Mistress Pallocons had been Ahairan’s creature, might have hit him even harder than moonturns of captivity among the Shamblers.
They’d been at Sapthiruk four days now, and Tiercel couldn’t really decide what was more unsettling: the way this place looked (changing almost hourly as more grass and trees and fields were planted and matured, although by now they seemed to have covered just about every square inch of ground in something), or the fact that it was so safe he could actually sleep through the night. (Assuming he could sleep through the night, which he couldn’t.)
There were only two ways in to the Oasis, and the only things (that they knew of) that could get through those entrances were Shamblers or Black Dogs. The Shamblers ought to be pretty much gone by now, and even if they weren’t, Bisochim still swept the desert around the Oasis every night at dusk with a monster Sandwind. As for the Black Dogs, Saravasse’s favorite place was up on top of the wall, and she could see for miles there. She could give them enough warning of the approach of a Dog pack that Bisochim should be able to take them out with a lightning bolt, and even if that wasn’t possible, they could bottle them up in the two tunnels and kill them there.
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