Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (71 page)

“The Verm believe you won’t do magic from the city,” Kirith Kirin said.

“Because of the Tervan walls.”

He nodded, tight-lipped. “It’s well known. So well known I never thought to tell you. No magician comes to Charnos because magic doesn’t work here.”

I blinked. Except it works for me, and that’s a bad sign. For a moment, just a moment, I was angry at him. “I’ll have to go outside. Now.”

The thought made him grim. But he knew as well as I there was no choice.

He sent word for the gate to be opened on my signal. Imral escorted me out of the palace and someone brought Nixva. I was wearing Fimbrel, but kept the color plain and the texture dull, as if it were truly merely a cloak; I did magic in doing even that much, but nobody seemed to notice. We had an escort of a dozen or so, for what purpose I don’t know, since I would go through the gates without any of them, even Imral. The gates were opening as we approached, and our party halted. I gave the signal to open the gate and waited.

I turned Nixva and he walked up the causeway through the gatehouse. On the other side of the gate we stopped, and I gave the signal to close it behind me.

They saw me, the Verm did. They were formed up in battle order maybe a stade away, out of arrow-shot.

Nixva walked slowly toward them.

I made a mist around us and we vanished. Consternation rippled among the Verm, and Nixva stepped easily into their ranks. Today we would make no room for mercy; so I put away my heart for awhile and began the long incantation Dead Hand Moving, as the Verm searched this way and that, maybe feeling the breath of my breeze as I passed, and when the song was ready, I set it loose and moved my hand from place to place, and this one died, and that one, dropped to the ground, each death more, harder, more painful, the Verm groaning, something melting in their chests, a burst of pain and the flesh a puddle there, one by one collapsing, scattered through the ranks, as though I were everywhere at once. Their confusion was complete. They had served Drudaen, not opposed him, they were not prepared for me. I rode through their ranks of infantry and their mounted wings of cavalry and soon the horses were screaming in terror as their riders died on their backs. I spared the horses, not only because it is unpleasant to kill an animal but because they have a terror of killing magic, they can feel it, and their reaction would create more confusion in the lines. By the time I stayed my hand and turned to look at them, the rear ranks of Verm infantry were edging away from the bridge. They gathered their dead and wounded as best they could and began a general retreat.

I looked into the eyes of a Verm woman as she lay dying at my feet. I released the mist and let her see me, too. Taller than Imral, broad shoulders, her breasts long and slack, the center of her chest dissolved into a kind of gray paste, the light ebbing from her eyes.

At the head of the bridge with the Osar at my back I showed myself again, a burst of light to draw their eyes, stripping the mist away. This time the ones closest drew back in panic, and the panic multiplied through the formations. Their officers, a mix of Verm and gentry, managed to get them in order after a struggle. I waited at the bridge quietly.

Consternation in the skies, too, and somewhere in my enemy’s mind a troubled thought was forming.

For the first time he showed himself, over Aerfax as I had expected, standing on Senecaur, and he reached to strike me with the strength of the tower, cold and sharp all through me, and I sent myself out of body in an instant, slipping rings on the fingers of my body and calming Nixva. He was on the Tower when we saw one another, him shining, white, and pure, not the image I imagined, not the monster I sometimes wished. He struck all the wards I had set from Laeredon, all the country I had learned to hold through the use of the Fimbrel cloak. In answer, the music swelled within Fimbrel, swelled and I could bend it, I could shape it, as one does with the eyestone on the High Place, so that when I defended myself he could not break me anywhere, and when I struck at him he was staggered, as though we were fighting on two towers side by side.

From the city, from Chunombrae, they saw a pillar of darkness rise from the Osar bridge, and day darkened as I drank the light in the vicinity of Charnos. This was not the pale light of shadow but the black of midnight. Kirith Kirin knew it was me, but even he had never seen anything like it. I had awakened Fimbrel and now I knew the scope of it.

Quickly Drudaen hid from me and went back to his defenses, but he was shaken, because it should have been easy for him to break me in some manner, with me on the ground and him in the air. I had no idea what he would see of the Cloak from Senecaur, what he would learn about it, so when he hid himself again I came back into the body and tamed Fimbrel onto my back. Nixva was skittish, some, and I wondered why, till I turned and saw a party of riders headed toward us from across Osar, red and blue cloaks mingled. I knew Karsten by her horse and headed toward her.

3

She thought I was riding back to Charnos, where she and her riders were headed, but I signaled her to stop the riders and drew her aside. We dismounted and she greeted me with the kind of warmth she had always shown, as though I were still that troublesome boy who tended the lamps. I told her to explain to Kirith Kirin that I needed to stay outside the walls. She asked no questions about that.

Nixva carried me below the city where the Verm army had regrouped. We scattered them farther south, this time without any more killing. I did some fireworks to keep them mindful of my presence, darkening the sky with clouds and flashing some lightning here and there, ordinary stuff. At the end of the day I held the road south and the Verm were scattered across the fens of Karns. This skirmish has been styled the Battle of Ajnur Gap by people who have the burden of naming such events. It is often cited to demonstrate the pointlessness of sending an army against a good magician.

I had enough to think about that I felt safer avoiding thought altogether, so I rode here and there on Nixva’s back, then found shelter for the evening near the river bridge. I got wood and built a fire, and Nixva cropped up mouthfuls of brown grass. Before he had eaten his fill, I could detect riders coming toward us from the city. People I knew, Kirith Kirin among them.

They rode straight for my fire and before long were settling around me, starting other fires from mine, unrolling bedrolls, a few tents. Kirith Kirin dismounted and found me almost shyly, and we sat together by my fire. A night of uncertain stars unfurled. The white moon crescent hung above the bay. With him beside me I felt safer to return warmth to my heart, to restore some feeling to myself, and I let down my guard and sat with him. In the air was the scent of the dead, the Verm I had sent to Zaeyn.

While we slept I could feel my enemy brooding to the south, uncertain what to do next, his army like so many rags trying to become cloth. But one thought he hid from me, something I would want to know, closely guarded, even in his moments of doubt.

4

He woke me before dawn and took my hand and we crept away from the tent. He signaled back the bodyguard and we walked to a grove of low, twisted oaks, the park fronting someone’s estate. Peaceful to stand there among those old trees, so different from anything in Arthen. To smell the sour sweat under his arm. “We have a long ride now.”

“Drudaen was on Senecaur. I finally saw him.”

He was searching for something, a sign. As if my face could reveal something to him. I went on, “I’m learning to fight him. I think I can get us to Aerfax. But it’ll get harder from here.”

“I know.”

I drew his face to mine and kissed him. We walked farther, along a stone path toward a group of graves. I had never seen graves before, marked with stone slabs, some elaborate, some simple and plain. Many of the Anyn bury their dead. We walked around the edge of these, out of respect.

We said tender things that do not need to be repeated here. I have tried to write them down but it is better to keep them for myself. He had felt the strain on me in Charnos, he said, and wanted a bit of quiet. So now we would be in the country for a few days while the armies provisioned themselves. We looked at the countryside, the twisted clusters of trees along the Osar, giving way to scrub brush, low pines and swaths of marsh grass as we looked south. We stood on a rise of land, the last undulation of the Narvos ridge.

At one point he looked at me and asked, “What are you?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“The pillar of shadow at the bridge. The day darkening so suddenly. You always forget how much of this I’ve seen. What kind of strength do you have?”

“Whatever I am,” I said, after a while, “I do love you.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

It would have been impossible to answer. We stood there, turned toward Charnos now, the high walls catching the eastern light. Good to stand there, good to feel the peace. But something had changed in his hopes.

He must have felt the change in me, because he made me look at him. “I love you, too, you know. It isn’t a small thing to do that, at my age.”

“I don’t know what it means, that you’ve all changed toward me again,” I said, “like the moment on Sister Mountain, do you remember?” My heart was pounding and I let it go on, without any magic to still it. “What does Curaeth Curaesyn say about what happens after a magician comes to Charnos?”

“Hush. Don’t ask me that.” Such a look of sorrow, such a perfect ice at the center of his eyes. “There’s nothing to do, my dear. We are who we are. We’re marching to Aerfax.”

“I can get us there,” I said.

“I know you can. He knows it, too. So now the question is, to what lengths will he go if he’s pressed?”

How far? A cold question, no answer.

We looked south. We stayed there and watched the changes of daylight. On the horizon hung rags of gray, the edges of shadow. Long after Vithilunen we were still standing there, as though a sign were coming. But a sign had come, already, and once again it was me.

1

Whatever difference that prophecy made, whoever knew kept the secret, and no one spoke about it after we left Charnos. The army marched. I lived in Fimbrel, on Nixva’s back, riding ahead of the main body, in a company of mounted troops and the twice-named. A few of the Nivri rode along with us, the ones who had been in Arthen with us, though of the Finru houses there was only Brun. She had asked to join the advance troops, figuring, she said, that we would get all the fireworks. She told me this by way of a joke, though it turned out true enough.

A good horse could make the trip down the coast of Karns to Kleeiom in four days, stopping at any number of inns in the fishing villages that rose up periodically along the road, paved though not magical. The waters of the bay came lapping onto the sand, low waves, nothing like Ocean, I’m told. Now and then Ocean would rise and inundate the road, washing away parts of it, and some merchant from Charnos would send a crew south to repair it. There is no reason to keep the road open, no destination south of Charnos worth discussing. Except Aerfax.

We in the advance party could ride at a pace that was fairly leisurely, and we camped early in the afternoon, avoiding the villages ourselves. No one has ever told me this was due to my presence in the war party, but I expect Kirith Kirin was reluctant to have me face the Karnslanders. Often we pitched our tents in the shadow of the dunes, adapting the linings to keep out the sand. Could I call that a peaceful time? Ten days march to take the infantry from Charnos to Kleeiom, and I never slept. At night I walked the beaches in Fimbrel watching the light show in the south, below the horizon, the fireworks over Senecaur where Drudaen was spending all his time, trying to understand what device I possessed that made me into, in his vision, a walking shenesoeniis. We were, both of us, except for our vigilance, mostly quiescent in that period, though he was moving his hand toward us in other ways than magic.

Kirith Kirin got news that an army was moving down from Antelek along the western road, clearing the wreckage from the first disaster and picking up some stragglers as they went. The army had marched straight out of Cunevadrim and would not be turning back. I was with him when he was talking the news over among the Nivri, when he sent for Karsten, who was with the army, to give her fresh orders in light of the new need to protect our flank. The Verm were only a few days away by now, traveling nearly as fast as the messengers who brought us the news. “He’ll send them down Kleeiom behind us,” Kirith Kirin said. “Bottle us up.”

The news made him nervous. I took note of the change.