She heaved herself back up. “The Harvester take me, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Pour me some, and be quick about it.”
It took some searching to find a corkscrew, and she took the wine in a carved wooden mug that still smelled of beer. The first sip hit with such violence that she doubled over in pain, thinking she would vomit it to the floor, together with the bit of food she’d eaten earlier, but she held onto the contents of her stomach, and shortly the nausea passed. And almost at once, her head seemed clearer, the ever-present wights shuffling toward the edge of her vision instead of leering at her from directly in front.
Nathaliey held out her hand for the wooden mug, which Wolfram had taken while he watched her with concern. She took another sip. This time, there was no nausea.
“Sorry about my sharp words,” she said. “I didn’t mean to order you around.”
A smile touched the corner of his mouth. “The wine must be good.”
“Have you never tried it? Here, drink a little.”
He took a sip. “Well, that’s . . . yes, I understand.” Another sip.
“You don’t know how badly I needed it. I thought I was going to . . . never mind that. I’ll be better now.” She took the cup back and poured more. “Would you mind terribly sending someone for food? I think I can hold it down now.”
Wolfram left the room and sent someone with cheese and roasted game. By the time he returned, she’d eaten, napped for a spell, and awakened to eat and drink some more. The wights were still present when she closed her eyes, but they had receded, and were fading. From the captain’s satisfied look as he appraised her, she knew that she must look better, too. The light cutting through the narrow windows had faded to a dim gray, and he carried a lamp.
“I’ve beaten it,” she said. “Maybe I really am a wizard.”
Eriscoban soldiers had come in while she was eating and carried off the maps, charts, and dispatches, and Wolfram brought one of them back with him, which he unrolled on the table. Nathaliey roused herself from the bed, threw a robe around her shoulders, and joined him. They stretched the paper out and pinned the corners with the lamp, the wine bottle, an empty bowl, and Wolfram’s dagger.
It was a map of the mountains, the seven castles guarding the passes, and the Tothian Way between Estmor and Syrmarria. Apart from the city itself, Aristonia was only a vague splotch on the map, with a handful of villages marked, and the Sacred Forest itself made no appearance, as if the high king already considered it erased from existence. Numbers, figures, and notes had been lightly marked with a lead stylus.
“This eastern lettering tests my ability to decipher it,” Wolfram said. “Is this number a two? And this is a five, right?”
“No, those are shorthand for larger figures. This one is a ten, and that one is a twenty. This mark here is a fifty. I don’t know what the rest of it means.”
Wolfram looked troubled, and hesitated a long moment before he spoke. “Those are unit types. Cavalry, footmen, archers. Other things I can’t figure out. Most likely types of supplies, because it’s in a column by itself, and I know this means wheat, and this seems to be leather.” Wolfram tapped his finger on the numbers. “But this is what has me alarmed.”
Yes, if he were right that the numbers represented units. Forty . . . did that mean forty thousand? It seemed to be. Forty and ten and two. An army of fifty-two thousand . . . was that even possible?”
“I heard two soldiers talking,” she said. “They mentioned twenty thousand men. It seemed a vast number.”
“It is a vast number. If you have twenty thousand men-at-arms, you need a hundred thousand to keep them supplied.”
“A hundred thousand people is greater than the entire khalifate of Aristonia.”
“Or any of our kingdoms, for that matter.” Wolfram tapped the map at the fortresses west of Aristonia. “Twenty—that’s this force here. If this map is two weeks old, who knows where they’ll be? And then you have thirty thousand more troops strung in encampments somewhere along here.”
“How many troops do you command?” Nathaliey asked.
“Seven thousand, more or less. I’d counted on an enemy force of twenty, believed I could defeat them, or at least fight them to a standstill. Force the enemy into a battle on the terrain of our choosing, leave them bloodied, and hope that your high king withdrew to seek easier prey.”
“The sorcerer is not my king, and anyway, this war is more than Eriscoba. It’s all of the khalifates, too.”
“Your people should have resisted when they had the chance,” Wolfram said grimly. “Now they supply troops to his armies and slaves to his road building.”
She clenched her jaw. “Some of us are resisting. Why do you think you took the castle so easily?”
“You call that easy?”
“You know what I mean. You shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. You shouldn’t have been allowed to approach the gates. Toth had a toehold on the western side of the mountains, and if he’d kept it supplied with fresh troops, he’d still be slaughtering his way through Eriscoba.”
“And it’s your wizards forcing him to delay?”
“Yes.”
“Explain.”
“If Toth held Syrmarria, if he had Aristonia under his thumb, nothing would stop those fifty thousand troops from pouring into your lands. And then it would be the barbarians serving as slaves and foot soldiers. Probably that’s his plan all along. Conquer the free kingdoms and send a hundred thousand Eriscoban slaves into the southern deserts. Build his sorcerous highway on top of the Spice Road until he’s conquered Marrabat and the rest of the sultanates to add to his empire. And if the pale-skinned barbarians die beneath the blistering sun, so much the better. And why should I care if he does? You care nothing for my homeland, apparently. We didn’t resist, you claim, and so I suppose we deserve what we get. Is that about right?”
Wolfram drew in his breath, and Nathaliey was aware that she’d been shouting. After half a bottle of wine from the gardens, her head was light and her tongue loose. She needed to rein it in.
“I’m sorry, Captain. I’m not your enemy, you know that.”
“I know.”
“I want to save my home and my people.”
“I know that, Nathaliey. Don’t think me a coward. I took great risks to rescue you. First at Estmor, now here.”
She looked down, her throat suddenly tight. “I am very sorry.”
“You’re right. We’re in this war together. Even Yuli’s griffin riders, at least until we’re through the mountains. After that . . . I’m not sure.
“But I can’t throw my seven thousand against an army of fifty thousand and hope to survive,” he continued. “If the griffins help us clear the castles, we can hold the mountain passes while we drain Estmor’s swamps and fortify the castle. Maybe raise another five, six thousand troops. Harass and delay . . .” His voice trailed off and he returned his gaze to the map. “Fifty thousand men. The enemy cavalry alone numbers ten thousand. By the Brothers, they have nine thousand archers.”
“Plus siege engines, engineers, and above all, sorcery,” Nathaliey said. “If you face those fifty thousand in Eriscoba, they’ll be backed by King Toth and his acolytes, because it will mean that no one from my order remains to oppose him.”
“And what would you have me do?”
Nathaliey studied the map, looked at the castles, the placement of Syrmarria. The gardens were not on the map, of course, nor even Blossom Creek, but she knew more or less where it was. She didn’t know what Memnet, Markal, and the others were doing, but they must be resisting. And all those enemy forces were moving to encircle them.
“There’s a friendly army in Aristonia,” she said. “It doesn’t show on your map.”
“How many?”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty thousand men?” He looked incredulous. “Where would they have come from?”
“Not fifty thousand. Fifty. That’s the sum of my order—wizards, apprenti
ces, acolytes, archivists, and keepers.”
“I see.”
“We fought Toth once and defeated his army.”
“I’ve seen what you can do. I wouldn’t discount it. But still . . .”
“You haven’t seen us in action, not truly. Memnet is more powerful than the lot of us, and our gardens are stronger than any castle you can imagine. Wights, marauders, sorcerers, and hundreds of Veyrian soldiers—we defeated them all, and by now the order will have rebuilt our defenses.”
“So you have a castle of sorts. And an army . . . of sorts. How will this help us win the war?”
Nathaliey touched her index finger to the map, to the gardens. “Bring your forces here. This is where we will destroy King Toth and his armies.”
Chapter Nineteen
They were passing through a stretch of rolling countryside, two days from Syrmarria, and still a day’s travel from the gardens, when Memnet tapped Chantmer’s shoulder and told him to follow him from the road. Memnet ordered Markal to take command of the cart, with Karla and the other surviving archivists accompanying him.
Intrigued, Chantmer followed Memnet into a meadow as sheep scattered ahead of them. This was it, he decided. This was the moment when the master rewarded him. He had battled dark acolytes, fought a fire salamander, and convinced a spoiled princess to rescue the vizier and save thousands of Syrmarrians.
True, he hadn’t done any of those things alone. Either Narud or Markal had been with him most of the time, but that was the point, wasn’t it? His magic and knowledge were equal to or greater than theirs, and so was his judgment. And now, knowing that Nathaliey had been elevated, and by Markal, no less, made him sure. All of his companions were wizards, and now it was his turn.
Memnet scaled a low hill and turned about as if trying to orient himself. “Here,” he said, pointing. “Help me pull up the turf.”
Chantmer frowned, surprised at the order. “Dig with my hands?”
“Unless you’ve got a shovel up your sleeve.” Memnet raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t think we were coming up to scout the countryside, did you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Then let’s get working.”
Chantmer bent, his face red with embarrassment. Why had he thought this would be about making him a wizard? Memnet had had several opportunities to speak to him alone over the past couple of days, the first coming only a few hours outside the city, when Markal and the others set off to leave the rescued men and animals with a group of refugees fleeing south toward the Spice Road. Yet he hadn’t.
Chantmer gave a desultory tug at a clump of grass, and was surprised when it came right up. There was a flat stone just below the surface, and the pair of them had it exposed after a few minutes of work. It was roughly three paces wide and six paces long.
“There was an entire stone ring here at one point,” Memnet said. He brushed away dirt. “Knocked down in the war.”
“The war?”
“Not the war—I misspoke. A war. Many many years ago. There was a battle near here, one of several in this area.” He kept brushing at the dirt, and Chantmer followed his lead. “But even if the rings were knocked down, they weren’t destroyed. They maintain their power—weakened by time and neglect—but still there.”
“I didn’t know the rings had a functional purpose.”
Memnet looked at him with a smile. “You thought they were decorative?”
“I was told they were built to honor the Brothers. Holy sites or something, like an old shrine.”
“That, too.”
“But I can’t feel anything,” Chantmer said.
“It’s dormant. The ones you see, the standing stones, are exhausted, at least here in the lowlands. But go to the mountains and find a ring and you’ll see its magic is still active.”
“Hmm. Markal told me something about the battle at the stone circle.”
That reminded him that Markal had declared Nathaliey a wizard after their adventures in the mountains, and he scowled. When he thought how he’d expected Memnet to bring him to the hill to give him the same sort of news, his scowl deepened. This was only another lesson, nothing more. Would they never end?
“Is something wrong?” Memnet asked.
“No, nothing. Only that three others have been elevated to the station of wizard, and I find myself with Kreth and Roghan and the like, nothing but an apprentice.”
“That’s an unfair comparison, my friend. Kreth and Roghan are lesser apprentices. They have a long way to go before they reach your level of knowledge and power.”
“Lesser, greater. What does it matter?”
“It matters a good deal,” Memnet said.
Chantmer groaned. He turned back to his work clearing away dirt before frustration made him say something unpleasant. That would only convince the master to suppress him further. His fingers traced a familiar mark in the stone.
“This is a rune of desolation. Like in the walled garden.”
“Good, yes. Wake it up—I assume you know the incantation.”
Chantmer did. He spoke a few words, let fall a single drop of blood, and touched the stone again. It hummed with power.
“It’s far from the road,” Chantmer said. “You’d need to lure an enemy here for it to do any good.”
“Only if we were to activate it in isolation. But we won’t be. All this travel I’ve been doing up and down the road hasn’t been solely to clear it of enemies. I’ve been working the old stones and . . . here, I’ll show you something.”
Memnet picked up clumps of sod and shook the roots to scatter dirt over the surface of the stone. While he worked, Chantmer cast a glance back at the road. Markal and the apprentices were almost out of sight around the bend. There was a village up ahead, but it was most likely deserted, either because the enemy had swept up the inhabitants as slaves, or because the villagers had fled the countryside. It wasn’t just Syrmarria on the move, but most of the population of Aristonia, trudging toward the Spice Road with whatever they could carry. Soon to be a people in exile.
The sky to the east was still dark and ominous two days after they’d abandoned Syrmarria to its fate. The air carried the tang of smoke, and they awoke in the mornings to find a thin film of ash covering their blankets and collecting in their eyelashes.
There were dead people in that ash, Chantmer thought. Burned in a fiery holocaust, turned to bone ash, and then floating through the air to coat his mouth and throat. It had all happened too quickly; for every person who’d escaped, another had died in the fires.
“This represents Aristonia,” Memnet said, drawing Chantmer’s attention back.
What the master had traced in the thin layer of dirt over the fallen stone looked nothing like a map, but something resembling a wagon wheel, with spokes radiating from an inner circle to an outer ring.
“The outer ring is the Sacred Forest,” Memnet continued. “It was once so thick that only the centermost part of the khalifate—called a kingdom in those days—was free for human settlement. The old woods are still intact here along the northern realm where the Forest Brother once lived, but in the south the forest has either been cleared, died beneath the encroaching desert, or been reduced to scattered stands of oak and maple. Here to the west, you find the sacred groves of trees—more remnants.”
“What are the spokes?” Chantmer asked.
“Lines of power.” Memnet traced his finger along four of them. “The main strength is here—north, south, east, and west—we’re standing on the eastern meridian right now. They radiate from here, at the center.”
“The center . . . is that the gardens?”
“Yes, you understand. There used to be four more points of power here at the heart of the kingdom, each controlling a meridian, but two were long gone before I established the order.” He gave Chantmer a significant look. “And the other two . . .?”
That was easy enough to guess. “And the other two were located at the walled garden and the Golden Pavilion.”
Memnet nodded. “The walled garden fell, or, more accurately, was destroyed in order to defeat the enemy attack. It was necessary, and yet a terrible loss. But so long as the Golden Pavilion stands, this entire network of spokes can be activated.”
“To what purpose?”
“Ah, you’re jumping ahead.”
Memnet brushed his hands across the dirt and smeared away the wagon-wheel-shaped map. He put the clumps of grass back in place, then had Chantmer leave a concealing spell to hide their work until the grass and soil and rain had a chance to offer a more permanent disguise. The rune, Memnet said, would stay active for three or four weeks. If, by that point, it hadn’t been used, the threat would be gone or they would all be dead. When they were done, they rose and brushed dirt from their hands and robes.
“This is lore that only two people share, Chantmer. You and I. Jethro knew, too—he dug it out of a book that remained in the library. A book that has been consumed by a fire salamander.”
“But not Markal?”
“Not Markal. In fact, I hid it from him. You’ll understand in a moment and know why I’m telling you and not one of your friends.”
Chantmer had no friends. He had companions, but that was a different matter. There was no connection he shared like that between Nathaliey and Markal, who possessed a strange understanding that Chantmer couldn’t penetrate. Chantmer’s other companions were odd individuals, like Narud, or below him in stature, like the various lesser members of the order.
“Any one of us can activate these runes,” Memnet said. “Karla or Erasmus could do it, even though they’re only archivists. But to call up the magic from the stones will take a wizard, someone to stand in the Golden Pavilion and raise power, to speak and channel the incantation.”
“If you’re telling me, does that mean I am . . .?”
“If the time comes, then yes. But not yet. I’ll tell you if it’s necessary.”
The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy Page 72