Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  Two that landed near each other immediately puffed smoke, soon followed by man-high walls of bright blue flames. Others landed among the crowds themselves, in one case smashing over the head of one of the taller folk. Smoke and vapors began to spread, filling the edge of the green with a thick, clinging, and choking cloud of fog that lay heavily over the heads of the yellow-eyed horde.

  “Around them, quickly! While it lasts!” The dwarf pointed to a gap that the crowds had left open when they followed him onto the green, and he whipped his team frantically. His small, sturdy ponies could get up good speed, and, driven by fear and flame and the insistence of their riders, Idgen Marte’s courser and the mule, and Allystaire’s huge stallion flanked it to either side, and they sped off into the night, leaving blue flames, lurching yellow-eyed villagers, choking fog, and chaos behind.

  * * *

  The sorcerer lurking in the gore-strewn house did not rage. He did not pound the table or kick the remnants of the peasants he’d slaughtered. He laughed and glided out of the house, trailing sickly yellow vapor from his fingers, eyes, nose, and mouth. He held out his hands and murmured, and the blood on them vanished as if polished away by scrubbing sponges. His robe wrung itself out and dried, and he walked into the night, still chuckling softly.

  He made a point of leaving the farmhouse a scene of bloody horror.

  “Oh the fools, the fools,” he said aloud as he opened his eyes wide, raised a hand, and folded the darkness of the night in on itself, stepping through the space he had bent. Tiny jewel-like points of glowing light—red, green, and dark blue—waited in the darkness beyond. “Fools! They rode away without defending themselves,” he said, laughing again.

  In the distant village, glowing yellow eyes went dark, blinked, and the possessed villagers passed out en masse, falling in heaps on the grass and the mud. This scene played out for the robed and hooded figures occupying the space into which the sorcerer had transported himself. Pairs of red and blue lights that seemed to hover in the air followed the action on the village green, as if a window to the field simply hung before them.

  No lights illuminated the place, natural or man-made, except that which emanated from the men within, if men they were. The plain stone walls were tightly and expertly worked and lacked doors or windows; it was a place that only a man or woman who had drunk of the power of sorcery could find.

  “What precisely have you achieved, Gethmasanar?” The voice that spoke was a hollow, creaking rasp. “You knocked a village of peasants senseless. Well done. Bhimanzir’s apprentice could manage the same with a cudgel.” The unblinking, brilliantly blue points of light focused intently on Gethmasanar’s yellow eyes, with fingers that leaked the same light interlacing beneath the point of a chin. These seemed to waver and smoke, as though light was not merely projecting from within the body that contained it, but leaking.

  A choked, angry sound emanated from Bhimanzir, whose red fingertips drummed on the arm of a chair.

  Some of the sneer drained from Gethmasanar. “Watch and learn. He may demonstrate his powers. We wait and watch.”

  “Should have destroyed him if there is any chance—”

  Bhimanzir was instantly cut off by two others—the rasping, nearly empty voice as before, and another, deeper and more resonant, a voice that vibrated between two pitches in a manner impossible for a normal human throat.

  All three of the other sorcerers straightaway fell silent when the inhuman voice spoke, and all of them turned their eyes to the hazy, green-rippled outline from whence it issued.

  “Silence, Bhimanzir,” it thrummed. “You are not given leave to speak. The results of your haruspicy are known to us…” Here the voice paused, but there was no inhalation, no sense of indrawn wind, only a gathering of thoughts. “We do not yet know if he is the threat we have come to destroy. Silence, the rest of you. Silence, and watchfulness.”

  The room fell utterly silent, save the sound of breathing, a sound that could only accurately be said to emanate from two of the figures within.

  * * *

  The horses were all lathered by the time they drew to a halt well outside the village. A few distant lights and the suggestion of buildings were visible. All of them were breathing heavy. The horses were tired and still frightened, eyes rolling and ears back.

  Idgen Marte was the first to speak. “What the freezing, bleeding Cold was that?”

  “Sorcery,” Torvul answered. It had grown too dark for their expressions to communicate much to each other, but they could imagine the grim, sour cast of his face in the single uttered word. “Sorcery,” he repeated with conviction. “I’ve seen it a time or two.”

  “What can be done about it?” Allystaire tossed the cudgel back to Torvul and began stroking Ardent’s neck with one hand.

  “Depends. That many folk under the sway, it’s one powerful bastard. Or it’s a number of them working together. Neither is good news.”

  “That did not answer my question, dwarf.”

  Torvul sighed heavily, and wood clacked against wood as he set his cudgel down in his seat. “No, it didn’t. I think you’ll mislike the answers.”

  “Out with it.”

  “Fine. There isn’t much, really. If it’s one sorcerer, you can find him and kill him. If it’s a gaggle of ‘em? Try and lay low till they’re gone.”

  Allystaire snorted. “I have seen sorcery before. It did not look like that.”

  “What’d it look like then?”

  “Fire. Gouts of it. At a battle.”

  “I can make fire and I can make it look like it’s coming from the air,” Torvul replied. “Sorcerers don’t call fire. Not like you mean. What’d the man doing it look like?”

  Allystaire shrugged and slid off his horse, patting its flanks. Idgen Marte clutched her reins and joined him in front of Torvul’s wagon. “What you would expect. Older chap. Robes stitched with glyphs and a long rowan wand…”

  “Not a sorcerer,” Idgen Marte commented, quiet, but insistent. “I saw them, in Keersvast, in the war with the Concordat. The Archipelago was crawling with them then. They don’t look like old men, and they don’t carry rowan wands.”

  “She has the right of it,” Torvul said, slowly climbing down off the wagon to join them. “What you saw, if he was anything, was a thaumaturgist. Not the same thing.”

  “Explain the difference, and quickly. We cannot stand around here all night.”

  Torvul sighed and crossed his thick arms over his barrel chest. “You expect me to condense distinct schools of magical theory into something you can understand?”

  Idgen Marte snorted and gave Torvul’s forearm a quick slap, her arm an indistinct blur in the darkness. “On with it.”

  “Fine, fine. What you should do is borrow some of the texts in my library,” he said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the wagon behind him. “But I’m guessing you can’t read dwarfish marks. All right then. Magic, which is an altogether poor term for what we’re dealing with here, well, imagine it’s a deep underground lake. So deep and so dark that only a few are brave enough, gifted enough, or foolish enough to go seeking it. A thaumaturgist, he travels down to the lake every so often, bottles some of it up, brings it home, and puts it in new vessels. This was your man’s wand, d’ya see? A vessel full of the stuff that he could call upon.”

  “Fine. Thaumaturgists bottle the stuff up in their devices and amulets. What of sorcerers?”

  “Sorcerers bathe in the bleeding lake. They live in it, leastways in part. One half of a sorcerer is there, and one half is here, walking around with you and me. And not the better half.”

  “That kind of power drives a man to madness or to horror or both,” Idgen Marte remarked. “In the war down in Keersvast, it chilled my blood to see them at work. Didn’t matter what side they were on; I stayed well away from ‘em.”

  “Whether it’s the power that makes t
hem what they are, or what they are makes them chase that kind of power, well, that’s hard to say. What’s certain is they aren’t here for any good purpose.”

  “Why are they here?”

  Torvul leaned forward and poked a broad, lightly scarred forefinger against Allystaire’s armored chest. “You, it looks like. Probably hired.”

  “Seems farfetched.”

  “How many people did we piss off this summer, Allystaire?” Idgen Marte asked him, her voice still carrying a tiny, whispery note of fear.

  “Many. But who among them would have the kind of weight to hire anyone with that kind of power?”

  “Probably not the Baron of Bend,” Idgen Marte said. “The Church of the Sea Dragon, then. Or—”

  “I cannot conceive of Lionel Delondeur hiring someone who could or would do that,” Allystaire cut in. “He is not a good man, exactly, not nearly the best he could be. Yet there was always something decent in him. Something I felt kinship with, even when we led armies against each other. He wanted the best out of his men, but also the best for them.”

  “A man can want to be loved by his folk and still pay wages to a dungeon full of torturers and a stable full of killers if it means they stay his folk,” Torvul noted flatly.

  “We can sort this out later,” Allystaire said, with a note of finality. “We have to go back.”

  Torvul groaned. “I was afraid you’d say that. Why? We don’t know where the sorcerer or sorcerers are, or entirely what they’re capable of.”

  “One sorcerer or many, those people back there are my people. He cannot be far away. Time for both halves of him to drown in that lake you spoke of.”

  “That was a metaphor,” Torvul protested.

  “I am not—”

  “…a subtle man. Metaphors are probably not beyond him, dwarf, but he mostly ignores ’em.” Idgen Marte cut through Allystaire’s reply with a smirk.

  “Well you’re gonna be a dead man if you go charging back there,” Torvul spat. “A sorcerer won’t stand still while you level your lance and spur your horse, and he won’t challenge you to a wrestling match like that gravekling. We already know what he can do to the minds of an entire village; like as not if that sorcerer gets close enough, he’ll just set up camp in that thick head of yours and walk you straight off a cliff. Yes, and they can do it, too, if that’s how they choose to direct their magic,” he finished, raising a hand to forestall Allystaire’s protest.

  “Then how do we fight them?” Allystaire’s hands curled into fists at his sides and he rocked forward on his feet, his body rippling with tension.

  “You don’t,” Torvul said, pointedly. “Or you hire another sorcerer to fight him for you.”

  “Are they all for hire then?”

  “Everyone’s for hire when you’ve enough weight behind the offer.”

  “Well what are they, then? A guild?”

  “Nobody really knows, Allystaire,” Idgen Marte said quietly. She stood in front of Allystaire and fixed his eyes with hers. “Many words and many pages have been wasted in guessing, but they keep their policy close. Why they’ve come north to the baronies, I couldn’t guess. But Torvul has a point.” She laid a hand lightly on his arm. “That village was a trap. We escaped it. Run back into it, with a sorcerer waiting, and you’ll die.”

  “If he was so powerful, how did we escape in the first place? There has to be a reason the trap was constructed in the manner it was,” Allystaire said. Suddenly, he shook his head. “It was not meant to kill us.”

  “And you’re the expert on sorcerers now?” Torvul smugly recrossed his arms over his chest.

  “Not at all. Ambushes, though? I know something of ambushes If a sorcerer wanted us dead, then…” Allystaire waived a gauntleted hand, searching for a word, “cloud the mind of the innkeep, not the entire village. Let us in, give us a room. Murder us in our beds. Bring down the inn around our ears and burn it. More effective, with less effort. He did not want us dead. Caught, perhaps,” he conceded, “but not dead.”

  Idgen Marte turned toward Torvul. “Now he’s the one with the point.” She frowned. “Not used to sayin’ that.”

  “Well, go on. You look mighty pleased with yourself, so finish up,” Torvul growled.

  “It’s too dark to see his face from that far,” Idgen Marte retorted.

  “I can imagine it well enough!”

  “If they really wanted us caught, there would be pursuit. Surely he could drive them a half mile or so, based on what you tell me. If they did not want us dead and they did not care much about getting us caught, then they wanted to learn something.”

  “Such as?”

  Allystaire shrugged, the pauldrons of the half-suit of armor he wore clanking softly. “They knew how many we were; the innkeep said as much. What we are capable of, or what we were willing to do, or something none of us can guess. His ambush was too clumsy to be anything but a probe.”

  “So what could he have learned?” Idgen Marte worried at her bottom lip.

  “Whatever he learned, it is not as important as what he is about to learn.”

  “Stones above,” Torvul moaned.

  “And that is what?” Idgen Marte tilted her head to one side.

  “He will learn that I do not abandon my people. And if he lingers, he will also learn what an angry Goddess has to offer him.”

  “You’re just gonna walk back in there?” Torvul threw up his hands. “Just slit my throat now, be done with it.”

  “No. Idgen Marte is going to walk back in there. You are going to think of what good you might be with your potions and poisons.”

  “What makes you sure either of us will do any good?”

  “Faith.”

  * * *

  They walked back to the village, leaving the horses lightly picketed in a well-protected strand of trees. Before they had walked away, Allystaire had taken Ardent’s head between his hands and spoken directly to his destrier. “Guard. Watch. Wait,” he had said. And felt less silly than I ought to have done, he thought, as the trio of them crept up on the village.

  They did not follow the road into it this time; they crossed over it and marched well out of sight of it while keeping it on their right. Rather than approach the green from its western side, they would approach from the south. Idgen Marte led the way, sword in hand, followed by Torvul, and then Allystaire; the latter received more than one dirty look from the dwarf, who managed to move along a good deal more quietly than Allystaire, with hammer, shield, and half of his plate armor, could manage.

  The fact that the paladin could even see the dwarf’s face was a minor miracle, in its way; the alchemist had produced a bottle of a potion from his cart, rubbed it in his own eyes first, and then offered it to them without a word of praise for its merits.

  Much to his own shock and Torvul’s apparent indifference, Allystaire had immediately begun to see as though there were brightest, clearest moonlight; it wasn’t as bright as day, but it was a great and welcome improvement.

  Waiting for my eyes to start melting, he thought grimly, remembering his previous experience with the dwarf’s promises of bottled miracles. Nevertheless, they tromped on until Idgen Marte’s hand suddenly raised and stopped them; then she skittered away, sword held low at her side.

  Potion or no potion, she disappeared from his vision almost as soon as she stepped away. Shadow of the Goddess, he thought approvingly, smiling just a little. The thought that she might walk into a scene of carnage quickly settled his mouth back into its familiar thin line.

  Just as quickly as she was gone, even before Torvul had a chance to wax chatty, she returned, sword sheathed. “Come and see. No need for quiet, I think.”

  Torvul let his crossbow dangle against his chest from the strap worn over his shoulder. Allystaire kept his hammer in his hand, however, until he walked the few yards onto the southern edge
of the green and moved quickly past the buildings bordering it.

  Prone and limp, the forms of the villagers that had attacked them a turn ago lay scattered haphazardly. Allystaire immediately slung his hammer and trotted to the nearest one, pulling off his leather gauntlets as he went and stuffing them into his belt. He slid to his knees at the side of the nearest form, a peasant woman, still young, with long, loose dark hair, robed and dressed for bed, it appeared. He pressed his left hand to the side of her neck and let his eyes drift lightly closed. As he moved, he silently mouthed a quick litany: Please, Mother, please Goddess, please do not let them be dead.

  As soon as he reached the woman, he felt the faint fluttering of her pulse, not so much with his fingertips as with some sense that lived and moved within him, in his mind and body. A sense of the woman he touched, of her frailties relative to him or to Idgen Marte, of the thousands of ways she might be hurt. And with that sense came a kind of compassion that, if it was not without pity, was also not without admiration for being willing to live the life she faced. Somehow, with that sense, he guided just a touch of energy into her, just a fraction of life, and she sat bolt upright in his arms, gasping, mouth wide in horror.