Shadow and Light

by Peter Sartucci

  All day long, in between bouts of straining at his bonds, he had been stretching his magic sensitivity as far as he could reach. This ruined temple lay rife with rags of old spells attenuated by time to mere wisps. Newer spells tasted familiar, probably Chisaad’s magic, but they were few. He sensed one somewhere beyond the door like that diagram in Chisaad’s chamber and guessed it must be the near end of the Wizard’s teleportal link. The spells on the openings of his prison were plain, and he caught a tantalizing whisper of several more down the hallway toward whatever room his guards were living in. Far beneath the floor he could sense a node under the ruins, about the size of the one under Gwythford Castle. It didn’t respond to his mind and its magic seemed sick somehow, or else something terribly warped fed on it. A few moments of exploring it left him as befouled as if he groped barehanded through the sludge of a sewer.

  He pulled his sensitivity back inside his skin and the slimy sensation faded. The Light within him remained a gentle pressure, a soothing familiarity that washed him clean again. But he couldn’t use it without a magical device or focus in which to pour it, and the only ones within his range were his prison spells.

  Could he overload those ward spells by pouring more power into them? He divined their shape and construction with his mind, a painfully slow process, until he knew enough. Pour in power here, push it there, and the ward spells would probably collapse. He briefly considered trying it, if only to have something to do. But that wouldn’t free him of his bonds, and those unfortunately were simple iron merely shaped by magic, not magical devices themselves. Without the ability to cast an actual spell, he couldn’t affect them.

  I can be a vandal, but I can’t set myself free.

  More hours passed. He’d never been alone like this before. Mysterious creaks came from the building around him, and the monotonous whisper of wind against stone. The silence intimidated him more than a threat would have. He wanted to call out for someone, anyone, so he wouldn’t be alone in the dark.

  No. Fenman will mock me, and I’ll be even weaker in his eyes than I am now. I’ve got to stay strong.

  He tried to sleep. The moons spilled their radiance through the windows and limned the old temple walls with bars of light and shadow. Eventually sheer nervous exhaustion carried him off to a restless sleep far from any comfortable oblivion. For in that night there were dreams that he couldn’t remember, and one rude awakening that he wished he could forget.

  He woke as something pawed through his mind like a robber looting a home, carelessly tossing aside anything that did not catch its fancy. His very thoughts were bruised in its wake.

  What’s happening? Is this thing on my head reading my mind again?

  The sensation didn’t last long. Before it ended he sensed a distant echo.

  Chisaad! I can hear him through the spider. He’s giving orders to someone—or maybe something? Something that isn’t me.

  The sensation faded, and he found himself alone with a throbbing headache. One thread of hope gleamed in his mind.

  Does he know that I can hear him? If not, how can I use that?

  CHAPTER 38: KIRIN

  Kirin soon learned that wagon master Chiaver had meant it when he promised plenty of work. They stopped for the night in a tiny roadside caravanserai, barely more than a pounded-dirt plaza shaded by ancient trees and wedged next to the road. The owner dispensed hay and grain from a mud-brick barn in exchange for copper coins. Veglic hauled buckets of water for the horses from a spring-filled cistern behind the barn while Chiaver unharnessed them and rubbed their yellow hides until they were glossy. Then Kirin hauled feed to the beasts, and more water, and shoveled the team’s fresh dung onto the owner’s compost pile in exchange for a couple coppers off the nightly camping fee.

  When he finished the work, the wagon master bought the three of them a rude meal from the caravanserai owner’s wife. The steaming flatbread wrapped around boiled lentils, butter and greens tasted like ambrosia. They ate by moonlight, squatting on stone blocks under a grapevine trellis leaning against the barn, amid the scents of horse manure and the huge jasmine vines wreathing half the building.

  Chiaver exchanged gossip with the half-dozen other wagon masters that populated the caravanserai. They clearly all knew each other, and their curious eyes stabbed at Kirin. He’d mumbled out a story during the day, a mix of lies and truth that he repeated for them now. A young widower bound north to bring word of his wife’s death to her family in Belluno. He stole Zella’s connections to fabricate that and hoped she would forgive him. His obvious grief kept their questions at bay and he retired to the wagon as soon after evening prayers as decently possible. There he gave vent to some completely honest weeping.

  Maia, Maia, he cried inside his head, curled into a ball among the sacks of sponges. He silently cursed the darkness inside him and cursed the power that had brought this disaster down upon his family, even while praying desperately that Sevan and Carlai and the others were still alive. His only consolation was the confidence that Grigor at least was being cared for. The waggoneers’ gossip had included nothing about happenings in Aretzo. Whatever Chisaad and his allies might be doing had not come to the attention of these folk.

  Chiaver roused him before dawn, whispering blearily, “Veglic. Wake up and get yourself ready. Breakfast in a bit.”

  Kirin stumbled to the outhouse next to the barn, then through morning ablutions at the cistern with his employer and the other men. The place had nowhere to bathe so he could get away with merely rinsing his dyed face and hands and did not have to reveal his too-pale body. Zella had told him the dye would withstand water but not strong soap. The caravanserai wife fed them yesterday’s leftover flatbread wrapped around warm scrambled eggs and diced greens, all washed down with steaming mint tea.

  Kirin discovered that his muffled sobbing during the night had validated his story in the minds of the listeners. The waggoneers’ reserve had cracked, several gave him kind words and even blessings, which he accepted with what grace he could manage. After he watered the horses and shoveled dung again and while Chiaver and Ammin re-harnessed the beasts to the wagon, the caravanserai-wife slipped him a trio of oranges. Surprised, he tried to thank her, but she merely patted his arm and returned to her endless work.

  The icy peak of God’s Footstool gleamed in the early morning sunlight as the wagon’s wheels hit the pavement again.

  Chiaver and Ammin let him curl up among the sponges and rest in silence. The two of them sang low rumbling songs, about travel on the roads and tales of Seraphs and Kings. The wagon passed through laden orchards of pomegranates and oranges where birds chattered and hawks swooped, then through miles of irrigated fields. The rank scents of manure and growing things filled the humid air. They stopped at a spring under the cover of a grove of spreading trees while a brief afternoon thunderstorm rolled through. It soon sailed on north into the Valley, billowing clouds lit by the Suns like a fleet under full sail. The air smelled clean and sharp.

  Ammin brought out the sack of figs again and Kirin shared the three oranges given to him. Chiaver looked surprised, then pleased.

  “Thank you, Veglic,” the big man said in his gruff voice, with a warm smile.

  Kirin’s heart warmed as well. They all nibbled on sweet succulence while the stolid horses plodded onward. Afterwards the boy played delightedly with the single long peel Kirin had stripped from his own orange. Kirin watched him wistfully. Would he be able to play with Grigor like this someday?

  Not if Chisaad wins. I’ve got to rescue the Prince, no matter what.

  Evening brought another caravanserai much like the last. Kirin understood the rhythm of wagon-life now and threw himself into his tasks before Chiaver said a word. Work, food, sleep, more work, and another day’s travel. The miles crept by as they plodded towards the harsh wilderness of the distant Scarp, and the reckoning that Kirin both prayed for and dreaded.

  Will the Prince free Pieter? Will he have me killed for kidnapping him? The worri
es chased themselves through his mind without answer.

  Four days bled together, during which Chiaver and Ammin asked him few questions and he volunteered little, but the three of them grew comfortable in each other’s presence. They sang Orthodox hymns together and Kirin let his voice soar on the descants even while his heart ached for Maia.

  At night he dreamed of her, and sometimes wept anew. Other dreams were unhappy in a different way, featuring bonds on his wrists and ankles, the pain of forced immobility, hunger and thirst, and the ache of loneliness. Were the Seraphs sending him revelations of what the prince suffered? My fault, he thought, shamed anew before he finally drifted into an exhausted sleep without dreams.

  Then one morning they turned off the King’s Road and rattled down Pilgrimage Road toward Amm Crossing. Kirin perked up despite the humid heat. His family’s trip had not come this way.

  “We’re headed for Guglione next, Veglic, after we cross the river,” Chiaver explained.

  Kirin shivered inside when he remembered that Duke Darnaud ruled Guglione. His Shadow stirred uneasily inside him after days of quiet withdrawal. He immediately suppressed it, afraid of what these people would think.

  But the wagon master continued blithely, “That’s where we turn north toward Isernia and home. More than halfway there now, though you’ll have another day’s walk to get to Belluno. Maybe you can find a wagon making the trip.”

  Kirin nodded and muttered thanks, grateful inside that he wouldn’t have to do that in Guglione. The farther he could stay from Duke Darnaud, the better.

  An hour after lunch the road passed through a four-arched triumphal gate commemorating a long-dead King’s victory. The wagon wheels clattered as they entered a walled-in granite ramp lined by double rows of lotus palms and espaliered bougainvillea vines. It led east for more than two miles in a long straight descent to the river’s edge, the walls broken periodically by gates to hidden places behind.

  “Quite a sight, eh, Veglic?” Chiaver asked him proudly. “Nothing like it in the world.”

  Kirin gawked and nodded silent agreement.

  Two giant statues flanked the river-end of the ramp, each more than thirty feet tall and standing on oversized plinths higher than his head. The figures faced the river but as the wagon came closer he could see that both were female, clad in floor-length gowns, with bare upraised arms holding silver globes balanced atop their heads. Skeins of spell-fire trailed from each globe to connect to the far side of the broad water. A low rumbling came from the river, growing louder as they approached.

  Two officious clerks and a muscled guard stopped the wagon. The guard wore a Temple badge, half-armor and helmet and a sword, and had a horn on a strap slung over one shoulder. The clerks wore yellow robes with a prominent black symbol, two vertical lines and a longer horizontal one between, the mark of the special Temple order that ran the Crossing. The shorter clerk carried a paint-pot in one hand and a pointed paintbrush in the other.

  “Four dohba,” the taller clerk demanded in a bored voice while the shorter one began painting something on the wagon’s left side.

  Chiaver paid without objection while Kirin leaned over the sacks of sponges, curious to see what the painter did. The yellow paint glowed in his magesight and the man’s rapidly-moving brush shaped it into symbols on the wagon’s side. Symbols that faded and went out. A brief flicker of power drained through Kirin into the Darkness. For a moment he didn’t know what had happened.

  The painter stopped and stared at his work in consternation.

  “Are you done?” the money-collector asked, a note of annoyance in his voice.

  “The anchor-spell broke,” the smaller man complained.

  “Well, paint it again.” Impatience this time. The bored guard glanced at them and rested a hand on his sword’s pommel.

  The painter repeated his strokes as Kirin moved back into the wagon, hiding his chagrin and gripping his Shadow tightly in his mind. It pushed back restlessly, awakened by the proximity of so much magic in the Crossing. He lay down between sacks where the officials could not see him.

  “It worked this time,” the painter announced with audible relief. The money-collector muttered something caustic under his breath, then told Chiaver to move along. The wagon master flicked his reins and they plodded a couple hundred yards ahead to join a stopped line of other wagons.

  “Now we wait,” he announced to Kirin. “Looks like it won’t be too long, must be more than thirty wagons already. They send us across forty at a time.”

  Kirin climbed onto the end of the driver’s seat and shaded his eyes to see the waterside. “Are we allowed to go down to the water while we wait?”

  “Papa, can I go there too? If Veglic comes with me?” Ammin asked eagerly.

  Chiaver smiled indulgently. “Yes, both of you, but come right back when the first gong sounds.”

  Kirin and Ammin both scrambled over the wagon’s right side and dropped to the pavement. Ammin took one of Kirin’s hands and they walked toward the riverbank. Kirin counted thirty-two wagons in line ahead of them, mostly freight wagons like their own. But two carried pilgrims returning to their homes in eastern Silbar or points farther east. An enclosed coach occupied by an Annubhinish merchant and his family filled out the line, with mounted guards before and behind it. Veiled women and girls leaned out the windows and made remarks to each other in their language. Kirin knew enough of the Bhinnish tongue to realize that one woman contrasted his shortness with the thickness of his muscular arms and legs and made extrapolation to other body parts. Embarrassed, he flushed beneath his brown skin-dye, clutched Ammin’s hand harder and hurried past. Gales of laughter followed his departure.

  He and the boy joined a crowd of other youths and men on the river’s shore. The statues were set back a dozen yards from the ramp, and the riverbank between them and the ramp had been filled by flat plazas with stone balustrades. Men and boys crowded the south plaza, plus a sprinkling of women.

  “The next king ought to put in a bridge,” one young man declared loudly. “Then we could stay dry.”

  An older man snorted. “River is all that kept the damned Gwythlo army out during the Conquest. Mages can shut down the spell, can’t do that with a bridge!”

  Others chimed in about cost and convenience; it sounded like an old argument. Kirin lifted Ammin onto his shoulders so that the boy could see over the crowd, then gazed around himself, amazed.

  “First time here, lad?” asked the old man who had argued with the opinionated younger one. He smiled kindly as Kirin flushed and nodded. “You’re in for a treat. We wade the whole width of the river on the back of Crossing Ridge, with spells to keep the current from sweeping us away.” He gestured grandly at the river.

  The ramp ran straight into the Amm. Muddy water swirled around double rows of granite bollards the size and shape of men that marked the outside edges of its path every ten yards. They were worn with age; Kirin vaguely knew the Crossing had been built centuries ago. He had also known that the Amm was a wide river but hadn’t known how wide. Here it looked to be two miles and more to the far bank, with the cones of the Ash Mountains fading into the skies to the southeast. The spells followed the lines of bollards, diminishing in the distance to a double line of dots. Several hundred yards out a row of wagons plodded towards this shore, with spells and water swirling around them. He couldn’t hear a sound from them thanks to the bellowing roar downstream.

  South of the bollards, the river broke into chaos. From the bank Kirin could see how it fell off the ragged edge of a long ledge that bore the crossing. Tapering fingers of still water ran out into the churning maelstrom before they too succumbed. Ragged black rocks reared from the white water, each skirted with glistening foam. The whole massive river dropped into a brawling battle between earth and water that raged for a thousand feet downstream and extended all the way across. The deep rumble shook his bones and a cool mist blew in his face. It smelled of a clean wetness quite different from the briny life
-heavy sea. For a while Kirin simply stared, soaking in the cool and the noise.

  Then the other wagon train arrived at the shore. The horses waded through the final shallows with much splashing and punctuated the background roar with the clatter of iron-shod hooves. The beasts’ legs were wet to their bellies and they smelled of their exertions. A string of pilgrimage wagons carried chanters reciting a hymn of gratitude for safe arrival. Some of the smaller, shorter wagons spilled water that had leaked into their beds. A merchant cursed in four languages as colored water draining out of his too-low wagon betrayed an expensive leak. Wagon after wagon thundered ashore.

  Ammin shouted to Kirin, “They’ll call us to go pretty soon. Let’s go see the mages before we go back to Father.” Kirin reluctantly turned away and carried the boy over toward the south statue.

  The river side of each plinth jutted forward a good ten feet from the statue it carried, supporting an awning and three wooden chairs. The middle seat had been shaped like a lounge. A mage reclined there, with another on his left and a priestess on his right, all in the same Temple livery as the clerks. Between the mage’s seat and the water-end of the plinth stood an iron rod knobbed with five silver bulbs bigger than Kirin’s fist. Spells ran from it up to the silver globes held by the mighty statues, and more spells connected the mage to the bulbous control rod. The power sheeted around each plinth, welling up from a small node deep below. Kirin kept a wary distance as his Shadow stirred inside his chest, fretted by all this power.

  “Let’s get closer!” Ammin urged, wiggling as he enjoyed this ride on his new steed.

  Kirin balked. “This is close enough.” A loud gong rang from the north statue. “Time for us to go back anyway.”

  He lifted Ammin off his shoulders, preparing to set him down. The boy resisted, stiffening and protesting with the eternal childhood lament, “But not yet!” Kirin had to heave the spindly child over his head to get him free. Then Ammin relaxed, and, off balance, Kirin set him down faster than he’d intended. Ammin’s belt caught on Kirin’s hood and pulled it sideways off his head before he could stop it.