Land of the Burning Sands (47 page)

But what happened was nothing he’d thought of. Instead, the pillars nearest at hand shattered. Shards of knife-edged stone whirled into the night. Then the farther pillars broke, and the ones after that, all around the circle. Tiny fragments flew like arrows, large pieces fell to the sand with massive, dull impacts. The fire between them died; the griffins were gone—no, the smaller one was gone; the massive black one had merely shifted back a short way. It called up a fiery wind; the desert trembled; stone shifted underfoot.

“I’ll break the desert itself,” Tehre warned breathlessly. “I’ll make a crack right across this hillside, a crack that goes down so far the molten fire under the sand drains down into the darkness under the mountains. I can do it. I can do it, so back away! Get your people away! Gereint, the mountains, I can feel them looming over there, all that stone; raw stone is just waiting to be shaped into masonry, don’t the stonecarvers say that?”

That was all the warning she gave him before she broke the mountains.

It should have been impossible. It was certainly a feat beyond any maker Gereint had ever heard of, yet completely unrelated to anything he could imagine doing with magecraft. But Tehre had certainly done it
somehow
. Though the mountains were far away and invisible in the darkness, he heard them go: the three on the right and the two on the left, and maybe others more distant still; a heavy grinding roar so immense it went beyond any measurement of sound and became a physical presence in the night. It went on and on, fathomless: a huge booming roar of stone falling, pounding against more stone, grinding inexorably downhill.

“Help me make a wall,” Tehre ordered breathlessly, standing on her toes to shout into Gereint’s ear. “They’re falling, but they’re not falling
right
, I can tell, the pieces are scattering all down the hillsides, they need to be a
wall
—”

No, it wasn’t a wall she had made, not yet. It was an avalanche, and it was huge. Gereint tried to use his maker’s sense of materials to track what Tehre had done, but he couldn’t. He reached after his gift for making, after the familiar awareness of materials that waited to be shaped, but that awareness was gone; there was nothing left. The loss was like the loss of a hand, of his eyes, but in place of the maker’s awareness was something else, a more direct awareness of power and force and strength, an awareness of movement and the chance that something would go one way and not another.

Not just the near mountains
, Gereint thought. Tehre had pulled down half the mountain range, by the sound and the feel of it. She had broken free the granite at the heart of the mountains and called the stone down from the heights toward the dry track of the great river—toward them all. He shouted back to Tehre, over the roar of approaching stone, “You should have
warned
me—”

“How long do you think I should have waited?” Tehre had closed her eyes, letting her maker’s awareness guide her. She said urgently, her eyes still closed, “I can break the pieces into blocks as they come, but I can’t get the blocks to fall where they need to go. There’re too many and they’re too heavy and coming too fast—”

Everything was
too heavy and coming too fast
. Gereint shut his eyes and tried to think about being a pivot in the world, a point of focus where forces balanced. It was surprisingly easy to think of himself that way. He could
feel
the grounded power of the hundreds of men below the hill, surprisingly steady, like springs of water welling up through the sand. He could feel the deep strength of earth and stone, behind or beyond the quick, foreign balance of fire; it underlay the new desert and rose, he thought, somehow
through
the men.

And beyond desert and fire and men and earth, he perceived the rushing stone and earth of the avalanche. He felt the shattered, thundering stone as a gathering rush of power—not a maker’s sense at all, not something he could touch or hold, not something that spoke to him of potential shape and form, but
something
.

Something suddenly caught up all the strength of earth Gereint could perceive, power right at the edge of his perception, stripped that power out of the men who had dared the desert, and through them pulled strength right out of the earth beneath the fiery sands and set it loose in an unfocused whirlwind.

Gereint, stunned, nevertheless caught up the freed power and bent its path. He let it slam through the world not as it wished to run, a wild and uncontrolled outflow across all the hills, but channeled into a narrow strip—was dimly aware of another focal point in the world that balanced against his, that supported him—the avalanche tore its way through the desert sand and piled itself up all along the western shore of the dry river, stretching north to south and then bending away to the west in a wide strip of… blocks, he realized at last. Not raw stone mixed with gravel and dirt and desert sand, but huge rough-edged granite blocks that Tehre had shaped out of the mountains, without chisel or mallet or the thousand years of labor it should have taken her. He opened his eyes, looking for her.

Tehre was sitting now at his feet, near the limp shape of Beguchren. She had one hand on the fallen mage’s shoulder, but her head was bowed over her drawn-up knees and her eyes were closed. She was not looking at Beguchren, Gereint knew. She was watching the cracking stone with her inward maker’s eyes, encouraging it to break along the lines she wanted, with something greater than the skill of any ordinary builder or engineer. Coaxing the blocks to fall into position even far to the west, supported by the enormous power Gereint had caught and made, in turn, available for her.

Gereint glanced over at the stranger, who was standing, oddly, beside the black griffin mage. Down by the dry river, he could dimly make out Amnachudran’s company—not with his eyes, he realized eventually, but with some new strange sense. He thought the men still lived… He was not certain. The griffins had not destroyed them. The dimness was a function of what he had done himself, was still doing. He thought they had not died when magecraft had suddenly seized on their strength and through them on the strength of the earth. But he was not certain.

The griffins were gone out of the wind, out of sight… He was aware of them, a tug against his attention, flame-edged monsters with no proper shape, pulling the natural strength of earth in thoroughly unnatural directions… but high, distant, not at the moment dangerous. Save for the griffin mage. He stared that way, torn, hesitating to go down toward the wall Tehre was building because he did not want to have the griffin at his back, knowing he did not have the skill or experience to do proper battle—

“Go on,” shouted the stranger over the gradually lessening crash and rumble and roar of the avalanche. “Go! Kairaithin won’t fight you!” His Prechen was fluent, not exactly accented, but with a foreign touch to it: He was Feierabianden, Gereint realized, and guessed that he might actually be able to speak for the griffin—and he had come with Tehre, and she had not seemed to think of him as an enemy. And now he said the griffin mage would not fight? If he had the strength and training and the
time
to fight the griffin, Gereint would never have trusted that assurance. But he could feel the wall still crashing into place far to the west, and there was no time.

He took a step down toward the riverbed, paused impatiently, and moved himself through a fold of space to stand beside the great wall. Above him and all along the wall, he could feel blocks break free, roll and crash down from the stony heights, pirouette, and slam into their proper positions. That was Tehre’s task.

But a deep steady vein of magecraft ran through him now, and he had a task of his own. He laid his hand against the rough face of the wall and made it heavily itself, made the block of stone more thoroughly stone, anchored it solidly to the rock that underlay the new desert and to the blocks that surrounded it. There was no moisture in the air. But the griffins’ desert was too new to have burned the memory of water out of the land. The river at his back, dry as it was, remembered water, remembered the rushing, unpredictable force of the spring flood and the slow, deep, easy wash of the summer. He let that memory bend around him, flow from memory into the moment, laid the memory of water and ice into the stone under his hands and between that block and the next and the next. He turned, trailing the tips of his fingers across the stone, walked slowly upriver, setting the memory of living water and the solidity of the earth deeply into the wall as he walked.

He did not know how long he walked. He was not only walking but letting himself blur through distance, moving higher and higher into the mountains, the dry Teschanken to his right and the wall to his left. He became aware, gradually, of a presence paralleling his path on the other side of the wall. It was a fiery presence, powerful… It laid fire and the memory of fire into the wall on its other side. Gereint’s first impulse was to fight that foreign magecrafting, but… the memory and training of a maker could not help but understand the balance and symmetry implicit in that working. Earth and water on this side of the wall, fire on that; it would be, he thought, a wall that would forever lock the country of fire away from the country of earth.

At least so far as the wall reached. He wondered how far it ran, how many mountains Tehre had shattered, how many blocks she had coaxed into shape and position…
That
was not any simple gift. No.
I’m something of a maker, a builder, an engineer, a scholar
, she had said. She had not said,
And something of a mage
. But Beguchren had wanted Gereint because he’d seen a streak of hidden magecraft in his gift; Gereint understood that now, because he had seen the same touch of magecraft in Tehre, only clearer and stronger, he suspected, than his had ever been while he was a maker.

The wall trailed off at last, high in the mountains. The blocks here were smaller and narrower, and then smaller still, until there was only ordinary unshaped stone underfoot and the clear sky of afternoon overhead, and nothing to balance and anchor and layer with memories of earth and water and ice… Gereint pulled his awareness slowly out of the stone. It took him a moment to remember his own shape, to remember he was not granite. Then he found he stood by the shore of a lake so immense that he could not see the other side. Curious, he tried to span the lake with his new awareness of space and movement… Even then, he could not find its opposite shore, only mist and glittering frost that reached from the surface of the water to the clouds above. The wall held any touch of fire back from it and from the rivers it fed, and at his right hand the Teschanken poured in an icy cataract down from the infinite bowl of the lake and away toward the country of men.

“This is not a place for the People of Fire,” said a hard, austere, weary voice, enunciating clearly to cut over the noise from the river. The griffin mage came around the low end of the wall to stand on the shore of the lake. He wore the shape of a man. But Gereint would never have mistaken him, even for an instant, for a man. He was horrified the creature should have come here, to this place, where the magic of earth and water lay so close to the ordinary world that one might almost waver between them. It was a terrible place for a creature of fire.

He shifted back a wary step, groping after magecraft, after memories of ice.

“Be still, man. Peace,” said the griffin. His tone, though weary, was also sardonic and edged with dislike. “You do not wish to do battle against me, even here in this place of water and earth.”

This was true. Gereint could feel the appalling force of the griffin mage flaring barely out of sight behind the shape he wore. The griffin
felt
old: ageless in the same way that Beguchren had seemed ageless. Gereint did not doubt the depth of the griffin’s skill, or his strength. He most definitely did not want to fight him. He knew he would lose. He said nothing.

“The Safiad’s man, the representative of Feierabiand… he argued the wisdom of sealing this wall from both directions,” the griffin said. “I agreed, and reached after a new wind, and called it down from the heights. The great wind that shatters stone… Your little maker has surprising strength. You lent a great deal to the effort. But not enough to build a wall along all the border between our two countries.”

Gereint groped after coherence. “You… helped her?
You
helped us?” It seemed too ridiculous a suggestion even to put into words.

“I helped you,” agreed the griffin, drily mocking. “Were you not aware? To build the wall, and then to seal the wall from our side as you did from yours. Walls are not a thing of my people. But this one… this one may serve us. Perhaps the man of Feierabiand had the right of it. A wall may serve better than war. I am told that Feierabiand would turn against the people of fire, raise up its mages and arm its soldiers with cold metal and ice, did we bring Casmantium to ruin. I am told that even Linularinum would enter the war that would result.”

This was a new thought, but, “It would,” Gereint answered the griffin mage’s sardonic tone. “I hadn’t thought… but of course it would. Feierabiand would have to renounce its alliance with your people, and Linularinum would have to support Feierabiand. We all…” He did not quite know how to phrase the thought.

“Belong to the country of earth; just so,” agreed the griffin. “And we do not. A truth my people had perhaps not sufficiently considered. Thus, I decided it would be best to ride this new wind all the way to its end. Especially as I saw no other alternative.” He turned, gestured back along the long endless structure of the wall. “This remains unsealed along half its length.” He considered briefly and then added, harshly amused, “More than half.”