The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle (21 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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In the light rain, Brill scrambled back to the edge of the eastern wall, and Anna followed more slowly.
Her stomach turned as she saw the blackened body that had to have been the young armsman who had asked why she hadn’t done anything.
One of the gates had fallen forward into the dry moat, and hundreds of the Ebrans, if not thousands, swarmed forward into the brick-lined depression.
Farther up the road, well out of bowshot, a dark-clad group appeared, and Anna could hear a low chanting of some sort. The darksingers?
Brill stood behind the parapet that was now only kneehigh, and began to sing.
Anna looked back to his players, but they held on to instruments and crouched under the protection of the northern wall as more arrows sleeted into the fort, mainly from the north.
“ … sweep forth in power and might!” concluded Brill.
A dull rumbling began, accompanied with a whistling sound.
Anna glanced around, but while the clouds threatened, for the moment nothing fell from them but light rain. Should she use her spell? The wind gusted around her, and
blew the brim of her hat down across her eyes. She ripped it off and stuffed it into her belt.
The Ebrans in the dry moat started to run, and Anna looked down to see a brown-colored wave rumble out of the north side of the moat toward the invaders. Within seconds, the moat was filled with threshing figures.
Anna swallowed. Most wore armor, and few could swim. A handful struggled out on the east or south sides, but before long the brown water was mostly still, where a few items floated, and one or two bodies were buoyed by air trapped in their garments.
The ground shook again.
Brill straightened and scurried back to the north wall.
Anna’s mouth opened. Another wall of soldiers marched around the dark-clad monks toward the fort.
The ground shook again, and more bricks fell from the walls.
“Power song … the power song,” gasped Brill.
Somehow, some way, a melody began, and Daffyd’s viola dominated the intertwined melodies.
Anna shook herself. The world was coming apart around her, and she’d done nothing. Nothing!
She gripped the mandolin. If she didn’t use her spellsong now, there wouldn’t be anything left to use it for.
The tower and the fort lurched again, and she steadied herself against the tower one-handed, as massive cracks appeared in the ground beyond the fort.
With a gulping, guzzling sound, the moat began to drain—and the thousands of new Ebran soldiers began to march forward.
Anna hummed, wishing she’d done more vocalises, but there wasn’t time, and she’d been too disoriented. She faced the darksingers and the oncoming troops and began.
“I have sung the glory of the thunder of the sky,
I am bringing forth the voltage so the bolts of death can fly
I have loosed the fateful lightning so the darkling ones will die,
My songs will strike them dead … .”
Even by the end of the first verse, the dark clouds were twisting back, and the lightnings turned, and white bolts flashed toward the dark singers.
Anna forced herself to keep singing.
Behind her, Brill sang something else, and beneath them the ground buckled and heaved as Brill’s spell and that of the darksingers meshed in dissonance.
When Anna finished her second verse, she looked up.
Only smoldering flames remained of the darksingers, but the Ebran soldiers were untouched, although they had halted, if momentarily, still more than a dek from the shattered Defalkan fort.
Anna turned. The western gates were being opened, and armsmen began to pour out, scrambling through the moat that was dry again, except in places, scurrying around limp bodies. Two bridge extensions dropped into place, and the horsemen followed, heading back west, as if retreating.
Why?
Anna looked back at the eastern side of the fort, a mass of fallen masonry, gaping holes filled with bodies and loose bricks. Someone led another set of horses from the stables on the north side, relatively unscathed compared to the devastation below and to the south of Anna. She shook her head, and was rewarded with a sharp throbbing.
A handful of arrows whistled past, and she flattened herself against the watchtower, the sole intact section of the fort’s upper walls.
“Lady Anna!”
At Daffyd’s voice she turned, seeing Brill standing with a heavy arrow through his chest.
Her legs like lead, she half walked, half ran, crouching, to where the sorcerer sagged onto the bricks. His eyes were almost blank as she knelt by him.
“Liende … promised …”
Anna looked around. Liende was still lying on the corner of the rampart, where Palian struggled to bind or splint the clarinetist’s leg, broken by one of the lightning-thrown stones. Daffyd crouched between the two groups, keeping his head down as arrows flew over the northern wall intermittently.
“Liende …”
“She’s right over there,” Anna said, taking the sorcerer’s hand.
“ … promised … all I can do …”
Anna bent to catch the words, but could hear only fragments.
“ … always golden, always young,
spells always cleanly sung,
from my death, bring her life,
… through all strife …”
“No—” she protested, even as Brill slumped back on the damp bricks of the fortress that he had built and that was falling with him.
Yet, with his words, her body tingled—that was the only term for it. What had he done? Why? But had it been for her? He’d called for Liende.
His hand went limp in hers, and his eyes stared sightlessly skyward.
More arrows whispered overhead, and a trumpet call sounded from the east.
Anna scuttled back to the holed and sundered eastern rampart and looked out. Although no darksingers remained, the dark-clad Ebran soldiers were hurrying forward, ignoring the sodden bodies in the moat, where only scattered puddles remained, and stepping around the cracks in the brickwork and ground.
Overhead, the dark clouds had already begun to thin, and patches of blue showed to the south, but the Ebrans kept moving westward.
Didn’t anything stop the devils?
She looked across the broken Defalkan ramparts, but nothing moved. When she glanced back to where Brill had lain, she saw nothing but clothes and an arrow. From where he was helping splint Liende’s leg, Daffyd’s mouth opened. So did Palian’s.
Anna wanted to shake her head, but she did not, trying to ignore the tingling that had raced through her body and had begun to subside.
The courtyard below was deserted, except for two armsmen, one struggling to help the other through the open western gate. Anna could see, farther to the west, scattered puffs of dust from fleeing soldiers, and one organized group, under a blue banner, slowly marching to the northwest.
Daffyd and Palian eased Liende toward the steps, but the other players had vanished, except for the dead violinist and bass hornist. Anna shook her head. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion … so slowly.
The Ebrans would be inside the fort long before Daffyd and Palian could get Liende down the steps—and Liende should have gotten Brill’s bequest, not Anna.
The sorceress moistened her lips and picked up the mandolin from beside the watchtower wall, humming slightly. Then she stood beside the wall, shielded from the arrows from the north. As the first Ebrans began to dash through the gaps in Brill’s once clean and well-formed brick walls, Anna began to sing.
“Armsman one, armsmen all,
from flame to ashes shall you fall …
from the strings, from the sky,
fire flay you till you die!”
A crackling bolt flared like a snapping harp string from the still-dark clouds, whipping across the Ebran soldiers. A second followed the first, and then a third, and fourth … until the sky seemed hatched with lines of fire.
Anna winced at the screams that seemed to go on and
on, covering her ears and crouching down by the base of the watchtower., trying not to watch what she had unleashed.
Her head ached, and her stomach turned, but she could see that Daffyd and Palian had gotten Liende almost down to the main level. A ray of light flickered through the clouds, and the air was silent, except for the moaning of wounded. Anna slowly fumbled open the water bottle and drank, and drank.
A dull thudding sound echoed through the broken stones, and Anna lifted her head and looked toward the Ostfels where distant dark clouds still swirled across the eastern sky. The ground rumbled, and more bricks toppled into the courtyard.
She peered over the crenelated section beside the watchtower, the only tower intact, from what she could see. Like ants, more columns of dark-clad armsmen wound their way down the road, past the burned bodies that lay everywhere, toward the dry and cracked moat, and toward the fort—and Anna.
Her battle hymn had worked on the monks, but not the regular soldiers. Her burning song had almost floored her, and left hundreds dead, or more, and that didn’t count the thousands swept away in Brill’s one-time torrent. Yet here there were thousands of the Ebrans left, all marching out of the Sand Pass and down toward the shattered remnants of the fort.
What could she do? She wasn’t quick, and she couldn’t think. Her head was already splitting.
Maybe, if she stood close to the edge of the tower, and projected—used everything with the same spell she burned the armsmen—maybe …
She shut away the sounds of the screams that still echoed in her ears, and eased herself toward the open space that had been the front rampart. There weren’t any Ebran archers close by, not that she could see, but some of the dark-clad soldiers were almost at the base of the walls, winding around the scattered puddles and getting ready to swarm up
into the stronghold. Their blades gleamed in the intermittent sunlight.
A dull thunder sounded, and Anna looked north toward the empty reservoir. Under the black banners were horsemen—far too many to count, and they were on the safe side of the disasters Brill had wrought.
“Lady Anna!” called Daffyd, scrambling up the steps and across the brick-strewn rampart. “We’ve got to leave. The levies have all deserted, except for those under Lord Jecks, and they are forming up to fight outside the fort.”
Anna turned to the youth, pointing to the north. “Look. We won’t get a mile.” She took a deep breath. “Get the others ready, and get Farinelli saddled. I’ll be there. One more spell.”
Just one more—that’s all I’ve got time or energy for—just one.
Daffyd opened his mouth, then backed away as Anna threw everything she had left into the spell.
“Armsman one, armsmen all,
from flame to ashes shall you fall … .”
As she sang, sending her voice across the openness, trying to stay free while projecting everything she could, trying to visualize lines of fire striking mounted Ebrans and Ebrans on foot, it seemed as though that behind the blue-green sky, behind the nearer hazy clouds that were disintegrating, giant strings thrummed and cascaded.
Fire—lines of fire—slashed again from the sky, and screams, screams that went through her like a knife, flayed Ebrans—and her soul.
Without really looking, just visualizing lines of fire, she began to repeat the awful words and melody, but her knees began to buckle, and the crescendo that descended carried blackness … and silence, a silence behind which echoed screams … endless screams.
SAND PASS, EBRA
E
laddrin staggers to his feet, putting a hand to his forehead. It comes away not only bloody, but with flakes of skin, as though his face had been scorched by the sun.
Slowly, he steps through the black tatters of the tent, and gazes from the ridge toward the west, toward swirls of dust, and smoke, and seemingly endless death.
A subcaptain lurches uphill toward him.
The songmaster clears his throat, then waits.
“We have the devils’ fort, songmaster. That’s about all.”
“What happened?” asks Eladdrin.
“You … ser … you must …”
“Tell me what you saw.”
“The sorceress, the blonde soprano—her voice was like a giant harp in the sky and she called the lightnings on the forward darksingers and twisted them back onto them.” The subcaptain swallows.
“And then?”
“Then … twice she called forth something like whips of fire, and the whips touched everyone in the first army, and they all burned, and then when the second army attacked
… she did it again.”
“Where is she?”
“We do not know, ser.” The subcaptain hung his head. “We didn’t find her body.”
“What is left of the Defalkan forces?”
“From the bodies we found, maybe half survived, but most scattered and ran. One group retreated to the north—a blue banner with a gold bear. Not many, say a dozen score. Scattered riders here and there.”
“Our forces?” Eladdrin forces himself to ask.
“It’s hard to tell, ser, what with all the rocks and the fallen walls.”
“Guess, then.”
“A third left, maybe less. None of them worth a dissonance.” The subcaptain spits on the rocks to his left. “Everywhere you look, burned bodies, bodies flayed with whips of fire. I’d flay that bitch sorceress, and then some.”
“Why?” asks Eladdrin tiredly. “We would have killed her. We already tried once and failed. She has no reason to be kind.” He blotted the blood away from his eyes, looking at the spirals of dust and smoke that swirl over the end of the Sand Pass. “Still, part of me hopes she is in dissonance’s deepest discords.”
“You lost all those darksingers, and … ?”
“I’m excusing no one. We did what we had to do, and she did what she had to do. There’s no room for hatred in war, Gealas. It destroys your ability. But, if I could hate anyone, I’d hate her.” He pauses. “Marshal up the forces, and find a campsite north of the battle. We’ll need to regroup—and we’ll need a lot of reinforcements.” As the subcaptain leaves, Eladdrin adds under his breath, “A lot
… and the luck not to run into more sorcerers like those two.”

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