The prospect was daunting.
All that Thaddius knew then was that he needed to go above, into the realm of light and conversation, before he lost his mind.
* * *
“Well, were you dreaming? Imagining? Were you really there?” an impatient father abbot grilled Aoleyn, as they say, in his audience in the deepening gloom of twilight. Beside Aoleyn, Elysant put her hand on the woman’s leg in support.
“I can’no know,” Aoleyn admitted. “And to be sure, it could be both, all three! But I think it true.”
“Her tale is sensible,” Master Viscenti interjected. “Her description of Ursal seems true to a cowed city, and Palmaris is more freshly captured.”
Father Abbot Braumin stared at Aoleyn hard. She knew that he was studying her every inflection, every twitch, every look away and look down. She didn’t wilt under that stare, but it was no easy task, for she truly wasn’t certain of the particulars her magical journey had shown to her. She wanted to be more confident, in both tone and reality, as she understood how critical these details might prove to be.
Braumin kept staring at her, but his visage softened. “There is more,” he decided. “Child, what do you know?”
Someone began banging on the door. “Father Abbot!” a monk shouted. “Father Abbot! News from the west! Father Abbot!”
Viscenti rushed over to open the door.
“King Midalis is dead,” Aoleyn whispered to Father Abbot Braumin. “He was captured and executed in Palmaris a few days ago.”
“Father Abbot,” a younger monk gasped, huffing and puffing as he ran up to Braumin’s desk.
“Brother Thigpen?” he replied.
“King Midalis,” the monk stammered. “Word passed from boat to boat, called across the Masur Delaval and all the way to our docks. King Midalis is dead. They murdered him, Father Abbot! He surrendered Palmaris and they made him … He pledged loyalty to their god. And they killed him anyway.”
Braumin wasn’t looking at Brother Thigpen any longer. His stare was drifting over to Aoleyn, who nodded solemnly with every word.
“Go and rest, Aoleyn,” Braumin quietly bade her. “We will need you to go forth again, I fear, and many times. The days grow darker.”
“The xoconai would say that they grow brighter,” Aoleyn replied, and she rose and left with Elysant, back to her room. She was soon fast asleep.
She was awakened by Elysant sometime later, when the night was still dark.
“What?” she asked, her eyes barely open. She tried to rub the weariness from them and then brushed her thick mane of dark hair from her face.
“Flashes in the north, across the field,” Elysant explained. “Master Viscenti asked for you at the wall beside the north gate.”
Elysant helped her find her clothes and ushered her out, through the corridors and into the night. They moved straight across the courtyard to the north gate, to find many monks gathered there, peering out. Aoleyn climbed the steps to the parapet and was immediately greeted by sharp flashes in the north, like flickers of lightning.
“Magical,” Viscenti said, coming up beside her. “We can sense it with these.” He held forth a red garnet, and Aoleyn nodded and tapped the stone hanging on her left earring.
Viscenti held his hand out to the north. “What do you see?”
Aoleyn closed her eyes and summoned the power of the garnet, seeing through it, out to the north. Every flash sang a song to her.
She noted something else, too, some different magic, concentrated and powerful.
“Their magic is not unlike yours,” Aoleyn said to Viscenti, when she returned from the garnet trance. “They … sing it differently, perhaps, but it is much the same.”
“What are the flashes? Graphite lightning?”
Aoleyn shook her head. “I know not the stones, if there are any. It isn’t lightning, or maybe it is some form we do not understand. They are bringing in reinforcements, I believe.”
The witch looked back to the north, then surprised everyone by sitting down on the wall and fishing a couple of gemstones from her pocket. “Protect me,” she told Elysant and Viscenti.
She closed her eyes and focused on the wedstone on her hip, and soon her spirit exited her corporeal body, floating up and over the wall. She heard the song of the quartz, but she didn’t need it yet. Instead, she spirit-walked across the dark field, using the song of the chrysoberyl to protect herself and using the garnet as a guide.
She was not surprised to see the flashes coming from within the loose framework of the pyramids the xoconai had hastily constructed, or to see many more warriors setting their tents outside of those pyramids.
It was the other magic, though, the less familiar magic, that drew the woman.
Her spirit moved through the ranks, then more tentatively past a group she knew to be augurs, the xoconai magic users.
She noted some new construction: high tables with ramps leading down to large cylindrical crystals. Hollow crystals, tubes smoothed inside, teeming with magical energy.
Aoleyn focused. She knew this magic, after all. Some of the spears of the Usgar warriors favored this particularly dull gray stone.
Some movements by the augurs revealed to her that they were suddenly on alert. One called for a sheet of shining gold, and when a warrior hustled up with it, the augur lit a candle and held up before the mirror.
The magical golden sheet focused and intensified that light many times over, creating a brilliant beam.
Aoleyn suddenly felt very vulnerable. She didn’t understand this magic, had never seen anything like it, but she suspected that it could transcend the realities of existence, somehow, that it could show these enemy sorcerers her spiritual presence.
Aoleyn flew fast across the field, back for the wall.
A beam of light illuminated the area to the side of her, then swept her way and just past her, but then right back, as if locking on to her form!
She heard the augurs cry out behind her.
Aoleyn used the quartz, then, willing her spirit, blinking her spirit, back to the wall and her body, which she quickly reentered.
“Are you all right, child?” she heard Viscenti saying. She nodded and forced herself back to her feet.
“What have you learned?”
“They will attack,” Aoleyn said. “Their warriors arrive in great numbers.” She paused and tried to sort it all out. “And there is more. We mustn’t ignore their magic. It is akin to yours, akin to mine own, but there are differences. Be on your guard, all of you, for our enemies are not without tricks.”
She paused again and considered the other magic, trying to make sense of the tables and ramps.
“Divine throwers?” she asked, more of herself than the others, as she considered the story Talmadge had told of Ursal’s fall.
“The man, Talmadge, spoke of them,” said Master Viscenti. “What are they?”
Aoleyn shook her head.
“How do they work? What do they do?”
She shook her head again, unsure.
“Catapults?” Viscenti pressed.
“I do not know what that is.”
Viscenti pointed to the top of a nearby tower, to a war machine with a long arm suspended between triangular towers.
“They throw rocks,” Viscenti explained. “A very long way.”
Aoleyn nodded. “Perhaps.”
* * *
The dawn came bright and clear, with the whisper of one word on the lips of every monk.
“Dragon.”
Aoleyn and Aydrian left their side-by-side chambers together, rushing out into the courtyard, shielding their eyes from the rising sun with cupped right hands as they stared out at the fields to the north. All about them, monks pointed and rushed, many stumbling around simply because they were so afraid.
And why wouldn’t they be? Aoleyn thought, for from the north, swimming in the air, came the serpent dragon, its small wings beating but seeming to do less than its snakelike body, which slithered th
rough the air as if it were still in the depths of Loch Beag.
“Kithkukulikhan,” Aoleyn said, and when she noted the gigantic humanoid sitting astride the beast, she added, “Scathmizzane.”
“This is how the attack on Ursal began, so said Talmadge,” Aydrian reminded, and he called to all the nearby monks, telling them to be ready for a fight.
The dragon swam closer, very high up in the sky, passing right above St.-Mere-Abelle, circling, circling.
“Surveying,” Aydrian said, and when Aoleyn looked at him curiously, clearly not understanding the word, he explained. “He is taking note of the battlefield, searching for weaknesses, no doubt.”
Aoleyn put her hand up to her left earring and stared into the sky, very quickly staring through the prism of the magical garnet. She noted something, some great concentration of magic, and she knew this magic. She had seen this magic out in the field.
The woman concentrated, trying to piece it all together. Stones of attraction, she knew, which could veer a thrown spear toward a specific piece of metal or could, if reversed, help deflect the swing of a sword.
She thought of the throwers, the ramps.
“No,” she said to Aydrian. “No, there is more to it than that.” Aoleyn rushed about, this way and that, not knowing where to begin.
“He comes!”
Aoleyn looked up into the sky again to see the dragon diving fast, swooping straight down at the monastery. She watched as Scathmizzane lifted an enormous spear—and she knew that spear to be what she had detected with the garnet.
Kithkukulikhan banked suddenly, breaking the dive, and, in that moment, the Glorious Gold hurled his spear. The huge missile, perhaps twenty feet long, flew down from on high, driving into the side of the main chapel of St.-Mere-Abelle, crashing through the stone wall and sliding in, nearly disappearing inside.
Aoleyn grabbed her garnet again and demanded the song, and before she even gathered the confirmation of the magic emanating from that spear, she began yelling to Aydrian and to all who would listen, “Get them out! Get them all out of the chapel! Hurry!”
No sooner had she finished than there came a long line of dull thuds, a continual whomping sound, from the north.
Monks on the wall shouted and scrambled and Aoleyn turned that way to see the sky filling with a swarm of missiles—not spears but heavy balls of stone.
No, she realized, not stone.
Metal.
Metal flying to the call of that embedded spear!
Aoleyn watched helplessly as the swarm descended, the wide-flying shots coagulating, called together, mostly, by the powerful and godly magic.
No lightning storm had ever brought such thunder. Ball after ball slammed the chapel, some close enough so that a second hit the first as it rebounded from the stone wall. Cracks became open fissures, fissures became a crumbling wall, became a collapsing roof, became a rushing cloud of dust.
Before Aoleyn could question anything, Aydrian grabbed her by the arm and hauled her off to the north, running so fast that she nearly lost her footing—and would have fallen, except that the powerful man held her up.
She tried to call out, to ask him what he knew, but just grunted and stumbled some more.
“They come! They come!” cried the brothers at the northern gate. “To arms!”
“The wall,” Aydrian said to her. “Remember what Talmadge said about Ursal’s wall.”
Aoleyn didn’t need to remember it. In her spirit-walk, she had seen Ursal’s wall, breached and blasted, and now she understood how that had happened.
She put her feet under her, then did better, pulling away from Aydrian and calling upon her moonstone to fly for that northern wall. She watched the sky as she did, following the movements of Scathmizzane, and she was not surprised when he lifted a second huge spear and let fly, right for the northern outer wall, not far to the left of the northern gate.
The missile didn’t penetrate the thick wall—but how Aoleyn wished it had!
No time to think of that misfortune, though. The young witch lifted higher, clearing the wall, then dove straight down, falling over the jutting spear. She grasped it and held fast, nearly swooning from the mighty notes of Scathmizzane’s song.
The magic teemed. Aoleyn called to it, demanded of it.
This stone, the lodestone, could attract.
It could also repel.
So she fought its magic with her own, slowing the notes, trying to reverse the notes.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! she heard across the field, beyond the war calls of the charging xoconai.
She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t strong enough.
But then she wasn’t alone. Aydrian was there. Master Viscenti was there. A dozen other brothers were there.
“Repel! Repel!” Viscenti shouted to them, all grasping the spear or, if they could not reach, grasping the hand of one who could.
The thumping continued in the north. The sky swarmed with stones, converging on the spear and on the monks, witch, and former king who held it.
The song turned, but the stones flew in.
Aoleyn gathered all her strength and screamed into the spear, demanding of it with every piece of magic she could summon. She had never dared to spiritually sing so loudly. She felt her hand becoming a leopard paw, and her legs, too, broke and twisted into feline form. She felt herself falling, falling, becoming as one with the mighty song.
But she would not relent. She could not fail.
And still it would not be enough, she knew. She pulled out the chrysoberyl the father abbot had given to her, then put her hand over the wedstone on her hip.
Out she went in spiritual form, calling to the Abellican brothers around her, imploring them, guiding them, leading them into the song of Usgar emanating from the magical spear, compelling them to add their voices loud and strong.
The spear thrummed with power, no longer a power of attraction to metal but of repulsion.
Aoleyn returned to her corporeal form and felt as if she was in a bubble—it had all taken but a heartbeat.
A metal-filled stone slammed the wall a dozen feet behind the woman. She flinched but threw more strength into the spear. Another missile fell short and skipped across the grass, and a monk cried out, thinking he was about to be splattered.
But no, the ball hopped and weirdly turned, flying aside.
“More!” Master Viscenti demanded, but he needn’t have bothered, for the song grew and grew and grew.
In midair, the flying missiles slowed suddenly and dropped from the sky, short of the mark, some even reversing direction to go bouncing back the way they had come.
Many more hit the wall to either side of the spear, a ringing, resounding, earth-shaking thunder.
But it wasn’t concentrated as it had been in Ursal, and the thick wall of St.-Mere-Abelle held strong.
From up above came the reports of lightning bolts, a reminder to those outside that the xoconai fast approached. The monks ran for the gate—sheets of lightning reached out across the field beyond them, covering their retreat.
“Run!” Aydrian told Aoleyn, but instead she lifted from the ground once more, flew to him, and hugged him tightly, then rose up along the wall, coming quickly to the parapet. Aoleyn plopped down upon the ledge, her back to a stone. She wanted to rise and join in the fight, to throw her own fires and lightning, to create sheets of ice, along with the many brothers, but she couldn’t even find the strength to stand. She had given everything she had to halt the song of Scathmizzane, to reverse the magic.
“Lizard on the wall!” a monk cried.
“Mine!” Aydrian answered, and rushed away. Not far to the side, Aoleyn heard her friend engaging a xoconai rider, dispatching rider and mount in short order with powerful strokes of his brilliant sword.
She heard the roar of a fireball back the other way, by the gate, and heard the cries of melting xoconai. Lightning flashed and flashed and the wall shook with every thunderbolt, and behind her, out in the field, perhaps on
their lizards on the walls, she knew that xoconai were dying.
She closed her eyes and hated the world. Her leopard legs twitched, her leopard arm dropped to her side.
“Aoleyn,” she heard, right before her, and she was surprised to see Master Viscenti kneeling there.
“Are you all right, child?” he asked. He lifted her arm and stroked it tenderly.
She managed a nod.
“We win the day,” he told her. “They are dead on the field by the score. Most turned back when the wall was not breached.”
Aoleyn nodded but hadn’t the strength to do more to acknowledge the good news. She felt herself slipping away into unconsciousness.
“How, child? How could you do such…” Master Viscenti said, stopping with a stammer, as though he simply couldn’t find the words to describe what Aoleyn had managed out there beyond the wall. He cupped her chin, and when she opened her eyes, he added, “You have saved the day, wondrous priestess of the west.”
* * *
The catacombs shuddered, streams of dust falling from the ceiling.
Brother Thaddius hunched over the parchment spread open before him, protecting the valuable scroll.
He looked up as the shaking and rumbling continued and wondered what manner of catastrophe befell his brothers up above. He thought he knew, for he, too, had heard Talmadge’s tales of Ursal.
The monk closed his eyes, torn. He wanted to go up there and add his power to the defense of St.-Mere-Abelle. He wanted to stand with his brothers, with his friends, to win with them or die with them.
But no, not now.
The shaking stopped. Thaddius waited a few moments, then moved back and pushed the candle back near the parchment. These new finds, contemporaneous to the return of Ferdinand, might prove important, he believed, although the implications of his findings were not yet clear to him at all.
He noted the scorn in the writings of some other brothers regarding Ferdinand’s claims, particularly when the monk had spoken highly of this unknown race, the xoconai.
For Ferdinand’s writings had seemingly broken a core tenet of Abellican law. Thaddius, who had once followed the teachings of Marcalo De’Unnero, understood this all too well. Ferdinand had thought the xoconai civilized and had spoken highly of their culture, from what he could glean in the writings of Master Allafous.
Song of the Risen God Page 34