The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle (20 page)

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Authors: L. E. Modesitt Jr.

BOOK: The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle
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ENCORA, RANUAK
T
he matriarch settles her considerable bulk into the polished ebony chair under the awning. Her eyes focus beyond the balcony at the harbor below the hilltop residence. In the blue-green waters are anchored a handful of ships, while another handful load at the grain docks.
“What else have you and Veria discovered?” asks the gray-haired woman after she settles in the oversized chair. “About the disharmonies?”
“They continue, Matriarch,” answers the slender brunette. “They center on the Sand Pass and the new sorceress.”
“She is not new, properly,” says Ulgar from where he stands in the sun at the stone railing. “Merely a recent
arrival to Liedwahr. And Lord Barjim will doubtless use her talents in his desperate efforts to fend off the dark ones.”
“Lord Barjim is an honest man,” says the Matriarch cheerfully. “An honest man, a caring man, and entirely the wrong leader for Defalk in these days. His consort knows this, and she supports him.”
“As consorts often do,” interjects Ulgar.
“Alya, about the disharmonies?”
“They continue, and all the scriers follow the soprano sorceress.”
“How do you know she is a soprano?” asks Ulgar. “Has anyone heard her sing?”
“Hush, dear,” responds the Matriarch. “She is a soprano. The harmonies demand that she be a soprano, and so she is. Just as the harmonies demand that Lord Brill and all male sorcerers reject true harmony. Just as the harmonies demand that poor brave Barjim perish and Lord Behlem succeed him.”
“And what else do the harmonies demand?” Ulgar smiles indulgently as he turns to let the hot sun bathe his tanned face and short silvered hair.
“That we let them work out the destiny of Liedwahr.” The Matriarch leans back in the big chair with a smile.
“Why did you lend Lord Barjim the golds?” ventures Alya. “The Evult will scarcely repay them. Nor will Behlem, if he can hold Falcor.”
“Two thousand golds are a cheap price to send Barjim and his levies against the dark ones. If he even inflicts enough damage to slow them for a year, the coins are well worth it.”
“We will be lucky if his poor armsmen can slow Eladdrin for a season,” points out Alya.
“There is a balance to things, daughter. Matters do balance, and sometimes it is but a question of knowing when to wait.”
“If there is such a balance—”
“Why did we need to send the golds? Because the harmonies work slowly, and the golds allow them the time to work their will.” The Matriarch leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.
A
nna stood by the northeastern watchtower. Her eyes flicked from Brill and the players on the open space behind her and then back to the empty road that led up to the Sand Pass. The distant pass was already overshadowed by the red-and-gray bulk of the Ostfels, and by the growing darkness of clouds that rose out of the eastern horizon to challenge the mid-morning sun.
From the parapet, Anna squinted out from under the floppy-brimmed hat at the road, and the hills and ridges that flanked it, but could see nothing moving—no armsmen, no horses. That motionlessness made the shadows that darkened the mountains to the east and marched down toward the fort all the more ominous.
Even the sentries on the watchtowers were silent, as were the archers stationed at every crenelation along the eastern wall. Anna glanced to the blank-faced bowman less than a yard from where she stood, but the archer’s eyes remained on the canyon, as did the eyes of all the archers who ranged the walls.
“You’re making ready?” asked Liende, stepping up almost beside Anna. “Can you help stop them?”
“I don’t know. I’ll do what I can,” Anna said. “But I’m not sure that waiting to see if a spell will work is ‘making ready.’” There was so much she really wasn’t sure about—like why she was so calm when a battle was about to break out around her.
“You will turn their storms against them?” pursued
Liende, as she fitted the horn’s mouthpiece into place. Like Anna, the clarinetist wore the faded cottons from Brill’s hall, and like Anna’s, hers were green, unlike most of the other players, who wore blue.
“No. I don’t know about storms.” Anna shivered, thinking about the truly terrible words she had crafted, wondering why she was doing what she was doing? Was there ever a good reason for destruction? She tightened her lips. The dark ones had tried to kill her, just because she was alive and in Defalk. She had the right to try to stay alive, didn’t she? But did that give her the right to use her new talents to kill? Or would they even work? Was she just a fraud?
Liende stepped back as Brill approached.
“The dark ones have begun their attack.” The sorcerer’s eyes rested on the clouds. “Soon we’ll see firebolts, stronger than normal lightning.”
“How long before we see anyone?” Anna glanced back to the empty road, and the seemingly empty ridges to the east.
“The storm comes first, with lightnings, then archers, and more lightnings …” He spread his hands. “That is what I understand, in any case.”
“You don’t know?”
The faintest breeze picked up, carrying more sandy dust out of the pass. Anna’s nose itched, and she rubbed it gently. Her eyes itched, too.
“That is what the dark ones did when they took over Ebra. That was more than ten years ago.” Brill did not look at her.
“You mean that for ten years they haven’t done anything?” asked Anna.
“They have trained a mass of darksingers, and they have spent the last year pushing the Whispering Sands and the Sand Hills south into Ranuak, enough to give them a clear road to the Sand Pass.”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t think I understand.”
Brill glanced back at his players, standing with their instruments, waiting, and then at the clouds. The sunlight began
to dim as the first edges of gray-and-black clouds touched the edge of the sun. “Ebra was isolated. That was why no one could help Ketansa when the Evult and his darksingers came out of the depths of the Ostfels. The mountains are too rugged in the north and west, and the ocean and the rocky cliffs bar entrance to most of Ebra, except for Elahwa, and the channel is narrow there. So the dark ones could raise storms against the ships. The sands in the south had drifted northward over the years, blocking the Sand Pass and most passage south to Ranuak, except for the hardiest of travelers. Besides, the Ranuans look unfavorably on strangers, especially Ebrans, and they discouraged maintaining the roads when Ketansa repudiated the cult of the Matriarch.”
As the gloom fell across the fort, Brill paused.
“Go on.”
The sorcerer studied the road and the hills, then continued. “In the old times, Ebra and Ranuak were one. That was before the winds changed and the Whispering Sands grew and joined the Sand Hills and blocked the Sand Pass to Defalk. They say that deep under the high dunes in the midst of the Whispering Sands, there is a temple. That was where Wahren cast the mighty spell to dry the highland swamps of Ebranu. They say he trained his players for a season, and that it took him more than a year to build the spell.”
Brill shrugged. “Others say that Wahren was only a myth, that the sands have been there forever. I don’t know. What we all know is that a little more than a year ago, the sands began to move, and mighty storms were raised, and that the dark ones reopened trade with Sturinn, and most of that trade was for weapons.”
A distant rumble of thunder rolled out of the east.
“We need to make ready, Lady Anna.” The sorcerer turned, his eyebrows lifted as if questioning.
“The dark ones will have to get closer for anything I do to work.” Of that Anna was convinced. Neither the mandolin nor her voice would carry that far.
“As you wish.” The balding sorcerer turned and walked several steps back to where the players waited. His eyes focused on them, one by one. “Sit down. The wall will shelter you.”
Anna glanced to the northwest, her eyes seeking Brill’s lake, wondering when or how he would employ it—if he could.
“Form up! Wall details!”
“Third mounted—to the gates.”
Below Anna, the courtyard swirled with activity. Armsmen scrambled up along the walls. The western gates opened, and nearly threescore men rode out, most bearing bows and quivers. Once they were across the bridge, the timbers were slid back inside the fort and the gates closed, while the riders split into two groups—one circling north, the other south.
“Woman!”
Anna turned, and the armsman swallowed.
“I beg your pardon, sorceress.”
Anna eased herself back beside the base of the tower. “This is all the space I need now.” The walled corner doubtless offered more safety against arrows, but who knew about sorcery?
The young armsman swallowed, then stationed himself to the left and back of the archer who had strung his bow and set his quiver on a projecting brick shelf. The armsman’s fingers gripped the hilt of the long blade, but he did not draw it.
The clouds were darker now, and the day darkened as they slid across the face of the sun, a sun that seemed somehow to Anna rather more red than the sun she knew—but that could have been from the dust that never settled.
From where the road seemed to vanish over a crest leading up to the pass itself came a trickle of darkness. Then Anna realized that the darkness was composed of dark-clad armsmen, with the occasional flash of indirect light on metal—swords or burnished shields.
Recalling the comments about archers, her eyes turned to
the hill ridge to the north of the fort, and she watched. Was that an Ebran archer? Then more figures darted from rocks to rocks to the few gnarled trees, moving south, toward the point nearest the fort. Anna inhaled, then exhaled, as she realized she was holding her breath. That wouldn’t help singing, not at all, but she’d never been called upon to do a concert—even a single song—in the middle of a battle where people were getting killed.
The Ebran forces seemed to pour down the road toward the fort, darkening the road as the clouds continued to darken the sky.
A single sword of lightning crashed into the hill ridge to the south of the fort.
“Storm song! Now!” demanded Brill, his voice almost shrill.
The cracking roll of thunder underscored his command.
The players began, and Anna wanted to wince. The stress definitely had an impact on their tunefulness, either that or their playing from a sitting position. She checked the tuning of the mandolin, crouching into the brick-walled corner to shut off the outside noises as much as she could.
Then she tried a vocalise, gently, hoping the dust hadn’t dried her cords too much, that she could clear her voice without too much effort. Her voice cracked, and she stopped and took a long swallow from the water bottle at her belt before resuming her warm-up.
The clouds dropped lower, thickening, darkening, until Anna thought she could almost stretch and touch them.
Crack!
Another blast of lightning smashed down, and the entire fort shook.
“Aeeiii …”
“Stand firm! Stand firm!”
“Lightnings …”
Anna turned. The top of the southwest watchtower was gone, leaving nothing but a mass of brick and dust.
To her right, Brill sang, trying to project his voice over other voices and the rumblings of the storm that swept down out of the Ostfels.
“ … mighty fortress is our song …
… stands against all nature’s powers strong … .”
Spang!
An arrow smashed against the edge of the parapet, then dropped onto the bricks less than a yard from Anna’s feet. The arrowhead itself was a triangular, serrated, ugly chuck of metal, tough enough that it was barely deformed by its impact against the hard bricks of the fort.
Flattening herself against the watchtower where the archers from the north could not see or hit her, she shivered momentarily, thinking that one of those had gone through her shoulder.
Crack!
Another flash of lightning slammed down, this time not far from where the eastern road ended at the dry moat, and the fort shook.
“Again!” demanded Brill. “It’s working!”
Arrows began dropping over the north wall and sleeting into the courtyard.
“Shields up!”
“Under the overhangs!”
The violinist beside Palian, whose name Anna didn’t know, crumpled with an arrow through his chest. “Keep playing!” ordered Brill, as yet another lightning bolt seemed to bend away from the fort. He began to repeat his spell.
Anna lifted her head and studied the eastern road, but the Ebran soldiers appeared to be still more than a dek away, and the rumbling of the storm would probably limit how far she could project.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” hissed the young armsman.
“They have to get closer!” Anna hissed back. Belatedly, trying to hold on to her concentration, she started a second vocalise.
The rain of arrows seemed to slow, then stop, and Anna shifted her position enough to look northward where she saw a handful of mounted archers, wearing the purple of Defalk, on the ridge.
As she watched, several Defalkan archers went down, and more of the dark-clad archers began moving down the ridge from higher ground toward the position taken by the mounted Defalkans.
A few drops of rain darkened the dusty bricks of the fort, then, suddenly, the few drops became a heavy rain, and then almost a wall of water, under which the melodies of Brill’s players half dwindled, half squeaked to a stop.
Crack!
Another lightning bolt slammed down into the wall right above the closed eastern gates, and bricks cascaded everywhere.
Whatever the lightnings were, they weren’t just electrical energy, and Anna wished she’d read the
Donnermusik
book, but vain wishing wouldn’t change the past.
Another wall of water, like a line squall, washed over the fort.
Within moments of the rain’s passage, the hail of arrows resumed—and the bass hornist went drown.
Anna looked up the eastern road. Under the cover of the storm, the Ebran forces had almost reached the dry moat.
“Under the wall there!” Brill ordered the players. “Now!” The sorcerer scurried up beside Anna and peered toward the dry moat. Below and to the east, under the hanging dark clouds, the Ebrans were fitting together siege ladders.
Yet another lightning bolt smashed into the fort, right at the eastern gates—and then another. Anna grabbed the wall to steady herself as the entire fort shook.
“Archers! Fire!”
The Defalkan bowmen began to release arrows into the massed Ebran troops, who immediately lifted heavy round shields.
Some arrows deflected into the air; some imbedded in shields, some in Ebran soldiers, and within a handful of moments dozens of dark-clad bodies lay on the far side of the dry moat.
Crack!
“Down!” Brill almost flung Anna around the side of the
watchtower, following her and jamming them into the shielded corner formed by the north wall and the watchtower wall.
Crack! Crack!
Lines of lightning flashed across the entire eastern wall, slamming the fort with jolts hard enough to jerk Anna back and forth across the bricks, raising dust everywhere, despite the fort’s earlier drenching. Then another line squall, another instant wall of water, crashed across the Defalkan fort.
Anna scrambled back into a sitting position and glanced down the wall, catching sight of Palian, Daffyd, and Liende crouching next to the wall. Dozens of still figures lay in the courtyard below, and the eastern wall was riddled with fissures.

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