King Toth had dismounted in the meadow. While his army hurled themselves against the defenses, he lifted his hands overhead. Power gathered in him a second time, a swirling vortex of it.
More stones uprooted themselves from the meadow. The ones that had already fallen joined them, lifting into the air once more. King Toth lifted his hands higher. More stones raised themselves. The air hummed with power. A massive boulder half the size of the Golden Pavilion itself came loose with a tremendous boom that made the ground shudder, as if it had been torn from the very heart of the world.
The whole mass of stones swirled overhead, directly above the shrine of the Golden Pavilion, over the vizier and his palace guard, over the heads of the members of the Order of the Crimson Path. When the rocks fell, all would be destroyed.
“The pure land sacrifices in its own defense,” Memnet said.
It was said in a low voice, barely a whisper, but Markal heard it clearly. When he looked up, the wizard fixed him with his gaze.
No!
He couldn’t. He remembered the desolation Nathaliey had called up, destroying the invaders but consuming the walled garden in the process. And now Memnet wanted Markal to do the same thing here. It would be the end of the gardens if he did. Only a wasteland would remain.
“No, Master. No.”
“Then you must stop it, Markal. You must find your power, must eliminate your doubts. Quickly, now. It is our last chance. You know what to do?”
“Yes.”
Markal closed his eyes and placed his hands palm down. He didn’t need much. Only a flicker, power he could summon easily if he had the presence of mind. This was a place of strength, the heart of their defenses. If not here, then where?
“Sumas ascendit. Periculum est super nos.”
He raised all his power and sent it flooding out, or at least as much as he could direct, which was enough, he thought. Wake up! It was the same spell he’d cast earlier that night to rouse Nathaliey and warn her of the attack on the north gate. But instead of sending it to the minds of his companions, he directed it to the bell. It had taken a blow, but was not broken.
The bell boomed hard enough to shake his bones and make his ears ache. The stones were falling from the sky at the same moment. They came straight down at the shrine and its defenders, but this time they bent away as if there were a shield over the top of the shrine. Some bounced off and splashed into the lake with tremendous geysers of water. Others struck the attacking army. The largest boulder, the one that could have demolished the pavilion by itself, slammed into the Veyrians and rolled across the meadow, leaving a trail of destruction.
When the hail of rock had ceased, all was silent except for the groans of the dying and the last, reverberating sound of the bell. The Golden Pavilion was battered, but still standing. There were still hundreds of Veyrians, perhaps as many as two thousand on the battlefield, but hundreds lay dead or crippled. They lay in great heaps, in front of, behind, and within the trenches. Slaughtered at the feet of the Syrmarrian guards.
Meanwhile, King Toth had fallen to the ground, and now rose shakily to his feet and leaned against two of his men for support. He’d called up his strongest magic, an awesome display of power, only to see it cripple his own army. As the Veyrians seemed to notice the same thing, they turned and fled. Nathaliey and Narud had the presence of mind to call up incantations to speed their flight. Soon, the enemy was in complete disarray, fleeing toward the woods or running back around the lakeside path.
Only the marauders remained. They gathered in a knot of about fifteen gray-cloaked enemies around their king, half of them mounted, half on foot. One of them threw his cloak around Toth’s shoulders, and this seemed to strengthen the king. He found a horse and climbed into the saddle.
Markal hurried up to the platform to get a better view. His companions stood, tense and ready for what came next.
“He’s finished,” Chantmer said. His voice was tight. “Look at him, he’s drained his magic. That spell with the stones took everything.”
“That was more than a spell,” Nathaliey said. “Who could manage such a thing?”
“It wasn’t as powerful as all that,” Chantmer said. “Markal turned it aside with a simple trick.”
It could have been taken as a dismissal of Markal’s role in the battle, but it was simply fact. A deflection, nothing more. It was the sorcerer’s own hubris that led him to this point, and Markal had taken advantage of it.
“What now, Master?” Markal asked.
Memnet had dropped his staff, and he leaned against one of the support beams holding up the roof of the shrine. The scars remained in the wood from when Bronwyn had hacked off the runes. The beams themselves were split and battered from the attack with the stones. Splinters lay about their feet.
“He is finished,” Chantmer insisted.
“So are we,” Nathaliey said.
She was right. Their magic users were spent, hands bloodied from the youngest acolyte to the oldest keeper. The enemy had survived their runes and wards. Only the bell and the trench remained, and these wouldn’t stop the king and his marauders. The vizier was doing his best to rouse the palace guard, but no more than twenty uninjured men remained. These were exhausted, leaning on spears or bending over and tugging at tunics while they gasped for air.
The marauders chanted and shouted. King Toth stood tall in the saddle in the center of them. He let his men carry on for several moments, growing louder and louder, then lifted a gloved hand and pointed to the shrine. The company moved forward. The horses broke into a trot, and the men on foot into a run.
By now the last of the regular soldiers had disappeared into the forest or fled back around the lake into the woods on the far side. An entire army, destroyed. But King Toth had other armies, rich cities, and kingdoms at his command. There was no other garden, and no other order of wizards to oppose him should this one fall. Once again Markal thought of the pure land spell that would leave all in ruins. Was now the time?
“Master?” Nathaliey asked, her voice thin with worry.
“Let them come,” Memnet said. “We have one last trick to play.”
He reached into the sleeve of his cloak and removed a smooth sphere of glass. Nathaliey gasped. Hope sprang forth in Markal’s breast. The orb!
“Hold them!” Markal cried down to the defenders. “Our master has awakened!”
“The wizard!” someone shouted, and then the cry went up through all of the defenders gathered around the Golden Pavilion.
Narud went to the bell and rang it. There was a discordant note in its song—it had taken damage in the stone attack—but it wasn’t entirely without power. The song did nothing to halt the enemy gathering speed in their charge, but the shouting palace guard cried out with renewed vigor, until they sounded like a hundred men.
Light flared on the platform. It was the orb, glowing in Memnet’s fist. Soon it was too bright to look at directly, and if Markal had been standing any farther away, the master’s face would have been washed out in that light. But alone of the ones on the platform and the battlefield, he was within the cone of light, not squinting into it. And what he saw destroyed hope.
Memnet the Great was not speaking an incantation. His lips were not moving. Indeed, it was all he could do to hold the orb without dropping it. He’d called up a very bright light, but that was all. If there was magic in the orb that Chantmer hadn’t squeezed out in his aborted attempt, Memnet was not drawing on it. Apparently, he couldn’t. This was a flash of light, and nothing more.
The marauders reached the trench. Everything depended on that last defense, but it didn’t hold. A few stumbled, and one man fell, but the rest came across. They struck the wall of defenders waiting for them, and there was a terrific clash of weapons. Men screaming, dying, falling back, thrusting forward. Strengthened by Narud, who kept banging at the bell, the Syrmarrians fought bravely, but were no match for their enemies.
King Toth reached the trench, and there he stop
ped. He gathered himself as if to send the horse leaping across, but either horse or rider balked at the last moment. Light flared out from the pavilion, brighter than ever. Brighter than the sun.
The king seemed to lose his nerve. He turned his horse, and as he did, he cried out, “To me! Defend me!”
His marauders fell back from the battle, fighting free of the remaining palace guards, who moments earlier had been on the verge of annihilation, but now let out a great shout of victory. Marauders on horses hoisted their companions into the saddle when possible. The group of them fled across the meadow.
There was little question of giving pursuit, and the vizier called back those who made as if to chase their enemy out of the gardens. The light died in Memnet’s hand, and the orb disappeared into his cloak.
Nathaliey hugged Markal and then Chantmer, and Narud stood to one side, looking both puzzled and pleased, as if he could hardly believe that they’d won. Markal knew how right he was. A moment longer, a little more nerve by the enemy, and total defeat would have been the result.
As his companions rushed to help with the wounded, Markal looked at the master, who was bending shakily to retrieve his stick. When he stood, he caught Markal staring and winked.
“You had nothing?” Markal asked in a low voice.
“Nothing whatsoever.”
Markal chuckled. “You had me fooled.”
“But not entirely. Not at the end.”
Markal glanced at the others, but they were caught up in the general celebration, even Chantmer, who descended the stairs to clap Kandibar on the shoulder and pump his hand. Markal turned back to Memnet.
“No, not at the end,” Markal told the wizard. “I was terrified when I realized. I suppose I thought all along that you’d summon some great magic when things were darkest.” He thought about it for a moment. “And I suppose you did. Because the sorcerer was expecting the same, and that was nearly the same as being real.”
“Now you see, my friend,” Memnet said. “Now you understand. There is more to this than brute power. And that is why you are now a wizard.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The wights made a final attack that night, when the sky was dark and the gardens quiet. Nathaliey thought that if the king hadn’t been so grasping, had made his attack after sunset, the souls of the dead might have turned the tide. As it was, they nearly overwhelmed the demolished north gate, and the members of the order and the remaining defenders only barely turned them away.
Nathaliey was only sure the fight was won when she heard the distant horn of the Harvester. It carried like a ghostly wail through the misty night air. Following in its wake was the faint baying of hounds. The Harvester had come to gather souls, and the necromancy that controlled the wights was faltering, their protection from the dark gatherer weak. They fled in terror, and that was the final, inglorious end of King Toth’s assault on the gardens of Memnet the Great.
But that didn’t mean that the king himself had fallen from power. Nor was Aristonia out from underneath the Veyrians occupying Syrmarria and building the king’s highway through the heart of the khalifate. When the wind blew in the right direction, Nathaliey could smell smoke from the Sacred Forest.
Memnet returned to his cottage in the woods and promptly slipped into a deep, nearly unwakeable sleep. The others started to rebuild their defenses, starting with the bridge over Blossom Creek. The first layer of protection was concealment, and that meant hiding once more. Within the gardens themselves, ancient wards had been spent, and these would take months, even years to restore, but if they could keep from being found, they could buy time to see it accomplished.
And then there was the walled garden. The soil had been so rich that it brought Memnet the Great back to life, but now this most fertile corner was desolate. Markal ordered the soil cleared away, the dead trees cut down, the stone path uprooted, and all of it buried in a pit on the far side of Blossom Creek. He brought in fresh soil and had it laid down, but no plant would take root. The land was poisoned, dead.
It was a terrible blight in the heart of the gardens, and they worried it would spread. Markal ordered the entrances bricked in and placed runes on the surrounding walls to keep the dead spot contained.
When that was done, Markal took Nathaliey aside and told her to take her father away. Kandibar and the palace guards were traitors against the high king and could not return to Syrmarria. But neither could they stay. The Syrmarrians had depleted the food stores, and outside trade to secure more was difficult.
On the fourth day after the attack, Nathaliey and the surviving Syrmarrians left through the south gate. She used her magic to hide them as they passed through farming villages and grassy vales filled with shepherds and their flocks. They picked up the pace as the land dried. The drought had touched the southern border of Aristonia, and here they came across a pair of abandoned villages, where the crops sat unharvested and blighted. The bones of cattle lay where they’d been scattered by scavengers.
The next morning, they reached the Spice Road, and the day after that encountered a caravan of Kratian salt traders who’d sold their cargo in Syrmarria and were returning south laden with silk, indigo, and khat. Kandibar paid eighty dinarii and Nathaliey gave sixteen jars of honey from the gardens to pay the Kratians to transport the Syrmarrians across the desert to safety. The great Sultanate of Marrabat awaited on the other side, with its sultan in his palace of red stone. Nathaliey would not be joining them on the road.
Her father embraced her and spoke in her ear against the din of bellowing camels and shouting Kratians. “Come with me, Natty. I’ve never been south, I don’t know their ways. You can show me around Marrabat, introduce me to the sultan.”
She smiled. “I’m not fooled. I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Well, why not? It’s a father’s duty to protect his daughter.” He held up a hand. “I know you’re not a child, but it’s not safe for you here.”
“The Brothers have granted me a gift, Father. I have worked and studied to develop that gift further, and I’m too important to this struggle to step aside.”
“You’re important to your father, too.”
“Don’t worry about me, just get yourself safely across the desert. Do what you can to raise allies—I have a feeling we’ll need them.”
He nodded. “Take care, don’t do anything foolish. I expect to see you again.”
“I will, and thank you.” She kissed his cheek. “I expect to see you again, too.”
Nathaliey had thought about traveling with them for a few days to make sure that they escaped completely. Veyrian scouts might spot them, or bandits might attack when they reached the dry hill country to the south. Or the Kratians might abandon the Syrmarrians in the desert at the first opportunity. But these were minor worries compared to what awaited Nathaliey at the gardens, and she was anxious to return and do her share.
She couldn’t help a bit of spectacle as she left. The Kratian chieftain was shouting for the caravan to get moving. When her father glanced that direction, she cast a spell to hide herself. When he turned around, he looked past her, blinking in confusion. Nathaliey smiled to herself as she walked up the road.
“First we hide,” she said to herself. “And then we ride out to battle.”
#
Markal was working at the north gate when a figure approached. He didn’t look up at first, thinking it was one of the acolytes, and kept giving instructions to the archivists who’d traveled from Syrmarria to chisel runes. Jethro himself had come, and he had copied three new symbols that Markal had not known before. Two were for the forest, but one seemed to have something to do with stone, if only Markal could be sure.
He stared down at the scrap of parchment, trying to work out the symbols and the writing that scrawled down the side to explain them. He might have been able to read them had he encountered them in the library, but here they were gibberish. And if he couldn’t understand them, then neither Chantmer nor Narud would b
e able to, either.
“I’m almost certain we should put it in the brick,” Markal told the acolyte. “We can bind it to the wall, if nothing else. When the master wakes—”
“When he wakes, he’ll say you should have put it on the underside of a flagstone,” the newcomer interrupted.
Markal turned, surprised. It was Memnet. He was still pale, but not so skeletal in appearance, and he’d set aside his staff and stood without support. He smiled when he saw Markal’s expression.
“Well met, wizard,” Memnet said.
“Well met, Master.”
Seven days had passed since the battle, and three since Nathaliey set out. During that week, he’d only seen the master twice, and one of those times the elder wizard had been stumbling along the path under the starlight, sleepwalking. The rest of the time, Memnet had remained in a deep slumber.
“Have you eaten?” Markal asked.
“Indeed. Two loaves of bread, a whole chicken, several pounds of cheese, figs, grapes, and a half-bushel of assorted greens and vegetables. But I’m hungry again. I suspect I will be for some time.”
“Can you . . . ? I mean, has it returned?”
“My power?” Memnet said. “A little. Enough to know that I’ll have full control eventually.” He smiled, and a glimpse of his boyish look returned. “No more need for back-alley tricks—I should be able to do the real thing next time.”
“I was hoping there wouldn’t be a next time.”
“You’ve bought us several months, I would think. Perhaps longer. There’s little we can do about the Tothian Way—the highway will continue toward the mountains—but we can hide our garden, build our strength, look for allies. All thanks to you.”
Markal blinked. “Me? You mean that spell to deflect the stones? That was nothing. Any of the others could have done the same, and better.”
“No, they couldn’t—we were about to be killed, and only you had the presence of mind to cast it—but that’s not what I mean. You led the gardens in my absence, dealt with threats, and saw that we were in a position to defend ourselves when the enemy came.”
The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy Page 27