Ah, Lady, two Northern men.
One bore blue sword, blue shield; he walked—or so it seemed—in the air above the shoulders of the armed Manelan guards. Where his blade fell, it fell in silence, and when sword was raised to parry, metal shattered.
He was not mortal; did not look mortal; his hair was a thing of wind, a cloud and a storm. No man could fight thus encumbered. No man.
By his side, hair drawn back, was the Northern bard. In his hands he carried the weapons of the Dark Lady; they moved as if they were an extension of his body. Alessandro was frozen for a moment in recognition. The Dark Lady. Kovaschaii. He had never found a circumstance so dire that he had been willing to call upon the brotherhood; did not, in truth, know how to begin.
Bard, he thought. Northern bard. The words made no sense; they were foreign words, Northern words, nonsensical syllables.
And this bard offered no song; his lips were set in a slender line, and his expression was so still it seemed a mask had been set about his face—a mask of flesh, pale and reposed.
Two men. Against such two, the cerdan of Manelo retreated, shouting orders, raising a cry kin to the cries across the shattered bridge.
The bard brought his weapons down, seeking neither flesh nor armor.
In the night, the stretched skins of the drums that had beat greeting and warning screamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HAD Kallandras been another man, had he in truth been born to the North and the halls of Senniel, or had he been entirely Southern, had he been raised in the domis of his father’s clan, the screams would have stilled all movement, all breath.
Although both of these men were some part of the man he had become, he had given his youth to death, and the passage of years, the songs of the bardic masters, had not deprived those lessons of strength: he leaped clear of the drums. But the gift of the magi, the weapons he bore, gained a sudden weight, drawn to the sounds of pain and death. They struggled against his tightening grip.
They were not his only weapons; had they been, he would have fallen; they rose too slowly to parry; the skins of the drums had closed around their edges, and whether it was the blades that clung or the instruments, the result was the same.
He struck out with his foot; caught an arm wielding blade just above the bend of elbow. A new cry joined the fading screams of drum, but it was brief.
He leaped up, into air, and his blades at last came free, but they were heavy in his hands, and their shape seemed to shift and change as he moved. He vaulted, shifting his weight to land, tensing his knees to leap again before his body acknowledged the full weight of gravity. Around these movements, steel, the dance of the blade, the promise of death.
The drums were beyond repair.
The makers of those instruments, however, came quick to the fray.
They shunted aside the unwieldy robes of the Widan; they dispensed with the pretense of diminished height. They were three, and they drew swords with the same perfect grace that Celleriant had: red fire to blue.
The Manelan Toran raised cry; their swords lost unison, and for a moment, purpose. Those that crowded the Widan at the dais’ edge paid for their duty with their lives; the red swords took them all.
They should have had quick deaths.
Kallandras did not pause to bear witness; he had seen death before, and he understood what he did not see. Instead, he took care not to join them.
But he was grateful for these kinlords and their red, red blades; his own sprang free of their unnatural weight as if called to battle. In the darkness, he could see the faintest trace of light across their edge—and it, too, was red.
Not even in the desert had the blades come to life.
They roared, or seemed to roar, as he raised them; they parried the sweeping arc of two swords. The third did not fall.
Instead, the water did.
From the back of the Winter King, she saw the river.
“Avandar!”
He acknowledged her without a word or a backward glance, for he saw what she saw; the river water gathered, losing the shape and form of wall. It rose, in coiling arms, limbs clear and undulating in the moonlight. Too many.
Too late. She could not tell who spoke.
“Too late? Why?” Her knees bit into the flanks of the King. But he would not go forward.
The water is a difficult element, the King said. The most difficult to contain.
“I thought the earth—”
Earth is the most difficult to call, the most difficult to wield; it sheds its form slowly. No one in need of haste will depend on it. Air and Fire come quickly, he added, but they are almost formless; Water is heavy, and if it can be held to form, the destruction it brings is vast. Be grateful that we are by a river and not an ocean; be grateful that the river is long and thin.
Gratitude was beyond her. Fear was not.
The watery limbs became tentacles.
“I don’t understand!”
Did you not hear it, Jewel? The drums that were used in invocation were . . . wounded. The power that they exerted over the water’s form was greatly weakened, but it was not broken; what they summoned remains. You see the water now as the water itself desires to be seen.
“Kallandras,” Avandar said quietly, “Or Celleriant. They must have chosen to break the hold the Kialli have over the river. They failed,” he added, as if he spoke of the downturn in market prices. “One, at least one, of the Kialli must have been an adept. If he does not release the water, it will not subside—but he has imperfect control.”
She could see, for the moonlight was merciless, the sudden fall of liquid; could hear the crash of sundered timber in its wake. Water rose again, thin and graceful; in its center, she saw the flailing limbs of an armored man and cried out.
He is your enemy, the Winter King said coldly. He is not of Clemente.
She didn’t tell him that she didn’t care; he knew it, and it angered him.
Instead, Jewel caught tines. Pressed her thumbs into the sharpest of their points. Blood ran down her palms.
Go, she said.
There was no pretense of request. The Winter King leaped forward.
Kallandras was aware of the water.
It had a voice, and although he had never heard its waking strength, he had weathered storms in the lee of the seawall beyond which Senniel rose like a maker-made cliff. He had watched boats in harbor tossed against the rocks and the timber docks; had seen sails ripped from their moorings go to their resting place in the crook of waves made wild by storm.
Such storms had almost prepared him for this one.
Almost.
But bard-born, he was caught by the water’s voice: by its rage, its fury, its sense of betrayal.
In the desert, water had been the source of life, its absence the source of death.
What life this water offered had been scoured clean. It spoke with death’s voice.
Upon his finger, Myrddion’s ring began to burn.
He could not heed that burning; the two kinlords did not; they drove themselves against the blades, and he was forced to meet their attack.
They were angry; they did not trouble themselves to hide it.
He had been taught, time and again, that anger was a fool’s preserve; that in combat, there was only the blade dance and the blade’s song; the tracing of the stars, the points of the Lady’s circles.
His masters, he thought, had never faced Kialli lords.
They drew blood.
Lord Celleriant stood a moment between the scant safety of two mortal dwellings—the tallest that stood upon the edge of the river’s banks. They would not last, and indeed, in this mortal geography, they were a poor choice of hiding place.
If, that is, one thought to hide from the elem
ental water.
Only the Winter Queen could now speak clearly to the rivers; only the Winter Queen could control, with contempt and ease, the water’s anger, the water’s fall.
In his youth—and that youth so far beyond him it returned at unexpected times—he had seen Arianne lift white, white arms in the splendor of Summer sky; had seen her walk into the stream of rushing foam and roaring water made by the falls of Lamentine. Hair streaming down her shoulders as if it, too, were liquid, she had laughed, raising hands as if to catch the bounty of the falls.
And the falls had . . . stopped.
The water ceased its roar, pausing, trapped in place against the sharp edges of broken rocks, and the smooth contours of worn ones.
Others, greater lords than he, had taken the Queen’s challenge, but where she stood triumphant and at ease, they labored, the gray of their eyes turning now to silver, and now to gold.
Aie, she was gone.
Beyond him, for his failure in the cold of Winter.
But she could not command memory; he took what he could, as if he were mortal beggar in need of crumbs.
His blade he now lowered. His heart was its sheath; blue flame flickered and died, as if guttered by water.
He watched Kallandras as he danced between the kin-lords, and it brought a smile to his lips; a thin smile, but a genuine one.
The water struck the roof of the building on his right; he sprang clear of the falling debris, waving a hand to flick the timbers and shingles to one side.
It was not a casual gesture.
If he had any hope of returning to the Summer Court—or the Winter one—it lay with the mortal woman, Jewel ATerafin.
And she had commanded him, clumsily and without an understanding of the binding force of words, to use his power to preserve.
Brother, he thought, lifting a hand as if to touch the mortal bard, your guess was wise; the drums were the source of their containment.
But they were not the source of their power. It is true: the world does not lie easy beneath the hands of those who chose to forsake it.
Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente had cause to be grateful for his Toran. Adelos threw himself bodily across the man he had offered his life to as the water passed above them, flattening the dais that now seemed such a paltry, flimsy conceit. The body of the Tor’agnate was crushed in that instant, and only by Adelos’ reflexes did Alessandro fail to join him.
But he could not hold Adelos; could not prevent the water from taking him. He watched in a grim silence as one of the two men he trusted drowned in the moving column.
And then he picked up fallen blade, caught Reymos by the wrist, and began his retreat. Few were organized enough to stop it.
One man stood against the river, hands raised in fists. The cloak that had hidden him—the cloak that had disgraced him—he cast aside; the water reared the greatest of its many tentacles above his head, seeking him blindly. He did not duck, bow, hide; he did not seek to evade; he stood, a challenge to the majesty of the wild element. Debris gathered at his feet, sloughing off his back and his raised fists.
He spoke to the river water in a voice both ancient and broken with disuse. But the water’s response was simple rage; without the binding of drums and blood magic, he had no hold upon its depths.
Once, once he had.
He was bitterly aware that among the Kialli there existed lords of power whose will, and whose memory, held the skills of their shattered past—bitterly, because he was not among that number. Oh, his memory was intact, but everything else about his past had been burned away in the Hells. This mockery of magic, this bastard summoning, was all that was left.
That, and his sword. The shield, too, failed to come at his call.
Water took the mortals in number; what had been an army was broken by the sluggish whim of the living river.
He despised them, these broken, terrified men. Death took them all, soon or late; he could not understand their significance in the plans of the Lord. Could not understand the need for secrecy; the need to hide.
The water struck him.
He rose in its fist; felt it wash across his face; felt it exert the sudden pressure of an almost unimaginable weight. And he smiled.
What need had he of air? Only the living need draw breath.
He rose, encased in water; fell, encased in water. The ground at the river’s bed grew dry and cracked as the element summoned what it needed, and he exulted a moment in its raw fury; it was kin to his own.
The Tor’agnate was dead. Dead by the hands of mortals, by the hands of the clansmen. The Lord would be ill-pleased—but if the other Tor had offered truth, if the Sun Sword could be found, such a loss might be forgiven.
He let the water play. There were deaths on both sides of the river that could no longer be avoided.
Against the water’s rage, Lord Celleriant had several weapons. But only one might accomplish the task set him by the mortal he had been commanded to serve.
Viandaran’s warning was just, and justified; the elements hated each other with a strength that rivaled the enmity between the Kialli and the Arianni. But the Arianni had one advantage: they were of the world. Even hidden, even imprisoned upon the old ways, the wild roads, they were of it.
He called air, and it came, its voice a roar.
The drums had been a gamble.
An expensive one.
Kallandras had failed before. In his youth, in the labyrinths of Melesnea, and beyond it, in the streets of the Tor Leonne. But each failure had failed to buy his death; instead, it had brought his brothers, their varied voices and experience the steadying influence, the salvation, he required.
The voice that came to him now was none of these.
But he recognized it: the voice of the elemental air. His hand burned; the ring grew bright enough to blind. To a man who relied upon vision it might have been fatal, but Kallandras had been trained to darkness. He leaped clear of death, and the eddying currents of the air carried him above the shoulders of the kin.
Their voices joined air, a howl of anger, a hint of fear, blended into the harshness of a language he barely knew. And harmony to it, harsh and beautiful, wild with the promise of death, a brother’s voice.
Allele.
Across the wilds of storm made now of wind and now of water in a mockery of nature, he met the eyes of an Arianni lord of the Green Deepings.
He could not bow; the fleeting gaze was salute enough. The kin rose to join him, finding easier purchase in the shelf of wind than they had upon the ground.
Kallandras frowned. The wind drove them back, toward ground. Into it.
The water rose as well.
Avandar Gallais struggled to sheathe his sword.
Jewel was aware of the motion although she couldn’t see it; he was behind her. The Winter King’s stride had carried them to the edge of the water’s range—and it was wide.
But she could almost hear the voice of the blade; could feel its weight, and its warmth, in her right palm; could feel the pain of its denial against the scarred flesh of her forearm.
You play a game you do not understand, ATerafin, the stag said. He had never called her by title before; the rebuke stung.
Avandar, she said, calling him in a way that diminished distance.
He did not reply.
She looked back. Gray mist radiated outward in a nimbus of light, and at its center, nothing. Avandar was gone.
There was no way to ford the stream. Although the riverbed was dry and cracked—a hint of the desert and its multiple deaths—the water roved freely.
Alessandro kai di’Clemente would never see water again without remembering the destruction of Damar.
But he would see it without fear. He would see it as the Lord’s man. He paused on the periphery o
f flight’s edge, drew breath, turned back.
There, in moonlight—the lamps had fallen, and lay crushed upon the cobbled stone and broken earth—he saw the Northern bard. Saw what the bard faced: red swords, red fire. Nothing natural. Nothing that the forest birthed.
He had offered the Lady his prayers, but he was of the South; he accepted her answer with a grimace. His men, upon the far bank, were scattered, but he heard the orders and the sounds of steel that spoke of retreat, not rout. Pride, there; pride for just a moment. Clemente produced men. The Manelan Toran were either dead or dispersed; they had failed in their sworn charge, but they had not chosen to seek the death that awaited the failure of such profound oath.
He met Reymos’ eyes in the darkness.
Ignored what he saw in them; he could offer his man that much dignity.
But he could not make noble what was ignoble. He steadied himself, found strength remaining in the bend of tensed knees, and ran.
The water struck the ground ten feet before him; he froze and before he could run again, he was caught.
But not by water: the air held him.
“Tor’agnate,” a foreign voice said, the syllables cold and too clear, “not on the West does your battle lie.”
He flailed for just a moment, and then stilled as he rose. The water roared and rumbled as it passed beneath him; tendrils slammed into his legs with enough force to bruise.
And then he was clear of the banks; clear—for a moment—of the water. He heard a grunt at his side, and saw that Reymos had likewise been carried above the din of battle.
Quickheart was lost. He could not hear the horse; could not see him in the darkling night. Home, he thought, and it was a prayer. But it was all the prayer he spared.
For he could see, thirty yards away, what his men fought.
Celleriant fought the water. To force the air to accomplish the simple task of setting a commander among his forces had been costly, for the water was its enemy, and it sought nothing but battle. Sought to destroy anything that came between it and its rightful prey.
The Riven Shield Page 69