Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (37 page)

She used words I did not know, and I assumed this was the Ildaruen in which Drudaen instructed those who served or followed him. But the lake women had taught me other means of surmising thought, and I read her pattern from a distance, and understood at once that I should challenge it.

She was summoning a storm, gathering rain and lightning in the clouds and calling a bitter wind from the mountains.

For a moment I hesitated, even after I knew what I had to do.

After the first Word there would be no turning back. She would know me then, and she would not relent until she brought me down.

But by now our speed had swept us onto the stretch of plain before Fort Gnemorra, and I saw the hastily-lit watchfires of those who waited there, feeling the fear that had overtaken them with the coming of the Witch’s shadow. These were my friends. They could smell their death.

She sang out for fire and light, and a broad, blood-red illumination surrounded her, lighting her hellish ride across the plain

With a jolt I realized I was so close to her I could see her with the eyes of my body. She had been careless, and she did not yet know it. She had let me come too close.

I rose up straight on Nixva’s back and called out in Words for light and fire of my own, and my Words were true. The thrill of it ran through me, that this was the world beyond Illyn and I was in it with my whole self, including the magic I knew, and I exulted as confusion rose flooded my adversary. She heard the voice of an enemy where she had thought to find none. Moreover, she heard Wyyvisar, and she knew herself opposed. She was dismayed in spite of herself.

While her thought faltered I bore down on her, both in speed and in power, so that Nixva swept across the plain at the same time I sang out against her storm and reached forward to hold the heart of her horses . The horses cried out at my deep touch, and Julassa failed to counter me in time to save them all. One of the horses died and his rider was thrown headlong. Julassa gathered her wits about her well enough to mount a defense that prevented me from coming so close again, but she was shaken.

Nixva swept by the dead horse and the stunned rider, some creature like nothing I had ever seen before, bigger than any man or woman, rising from a tumble that would have killed most mortals. I felt a fetidness from him and called out savage Words that sent pain through all his limbs and bound him, casting him to the ground, helpless. His cries were real. The sorceress had left him unprotected.

She struck next, working from the fifth level and within her body, hurling power back toward me and forward toward the army surrounding Genfynnel. This was a mistake, for her thrust toward me was absorbed in my defenses while her assault on the soldiers was insufficient for the distance. But she was still closer to them than I, and I feared when she was close enough to use killing phrases, many would die. I increased my efforts to reach her, forgetting, for the moment, any thought of attack.

Nixva responded as he always did, and our speed was as great as any we had ever achieved under the watchful eyes of our tutors. Julassa did not turn in her saddle but I could feel her awareness, and I drew close enough I could make out her hand clutching the white hood to her flame-colored hair.

One could hear the soldiers shouting terror beneath the walls. Not one man flinched, not one woman stepped aside, when the Witch finally reached the line of drawn swords and bows. The shrieking of her voice was terrible, as was the carnage she wreaked. I reached forward to challenge her and her body stiffened in the saddle.

I was no longer aware of thought or of the words that were pouring out of me, a sound of eerie singing from my living voice, the unearthly echo of Words in the kei space. I was bent on the witch whose every move I must understand, whose every thought I must anticipate. She kept to her horse with difficulty. I took the chance, and dismounted from Nixva.

From the ground, without the need to spare much thought for balance or for Nixva’s safety, I could focus more attention on my work. We were surrounded by onlookers, which I did not like, but I could not let my attention waver for a moment to warn them away. I need not have worried. In the moments that followed, fear cleared us a broad circle.

I began setting wards about her, and naming Bans to bind her. Twice she broke my song contemptuously, but not with enough authority to free herself from my binding. The third time she fought furiously, but in the end I would have had her, except she did the movement into spin and hurled herself some distance away, her horse trembling with the effort. A wave of heat and light like fire swept over me, and soldiers drew back, at the moment that her second Verm companion, whom she had left to defend himself, dismounted among the foot soldiers. Other, dimly-heard sounds penetrated my consciousness, and I vaguely realized the soldiers from inside the fort were attacking as well, the sky raining down arrows and stones from catapults.

Had I ever seen a battlefield before, that moment might not have rattled me as it did, but that brief confusion nearly cost me the fight I was waging, and my life in the bargain. My thought wavered from Julassa and she redoubled her attack, so that I felt her touch in my body and could hear the incantations she was intoning as she set up her wards around me.

She was nearly cackling, and both relief and greed radiated from her when she thought she had me beaten. She meant to drink my life as she had drunk the lives of many local powers who had opposed her over the generations she had lived. But I had not risked the Sisters’ anger to get beaten like some minor dabbler, some parlor-magician. I broke down her wards one by one.

She reached for gems to amplify her singing, and for a time I felt myself sorely pressed again. She was able to break the storm over us, and it was a powerful storm, but her control of its elements was not as close as she wished, and I was able to direct its main fury away from the plain on which the army was fighting. She ensnared soldiers who strayed too close to her and killed them, and for a while this fed her power, until someone grew wise enough to order the soldiers to stand away. I felt this happen and was relieved.

She settled down to a long fight. I could read the thought when it occurred to her, that what she could not defeat quickly she could wear down by turns. Force gathered in her, and she began her extended attack.

Time has an indescribable role in such a contest. She tested me on every level, probing each of my defenses while she launched attacks whose countermeasures cost me strength. Had there been any chink in my armor she would have found it, but there was none. I was in the dual state and far above us both, the present moment stretched as long as practical, and I understood that she had not begun this meditation and that she could never beat me from within the body. The realization came to me at the same that it came to her, at the end of a long sequence of application-and-countermeasure in which she tried a few tricks so simple I broke them with scorn. She must have heard the harmony of the dual state, which is unmistakable. She had begun her own fifth-level defenses late, and I could read her thought. She launched a fifth level attack so skillful it left me dizzy, but I was proof against it. Hardest to fight were those incantations she broadcast through hand-held gems, but in those moments I found a strange ally in the gems themselves, especially from my eye in the air. The Sisters had told me I had a gift for gem-magic, scarce praise, and on that battlefield before Gnemorra, when the witch employed these jewels as devices, I felt the power she was moving and understood it.

My hesitance to launch any assault on her she read as weakness, even when my defenses were deft. She set wards around me again but I broke them down — this time, noting her stance, her look of confidence, I was careful to break them with apparent difficulty, one by one, and to seem to struggle as I did so. She noted this. Soon after she set out on a dance of encirclement.

During this dance, wards of confinement are fixed into place one at a time by a movement of the physical body so they can no longer be broken easily. If she completed the round I would no longer have freedom to move beyond the ward circle, and from there it would simply be a matter of time before she ate my soul. If I fled from the field, as I could, to save myself, she would go on with her slaughter of Kirith Kirin’s army. But to stop her from setting the wards I would have to break her in the midst of her dance. She was doing me some honor at least. The encirclement dance is one of the high magics and, since earliest times, magicians have used it to test one another.

She moved quickly and surely in the dance, into and out of spin, light and fire flashing round her, the storm raging overhead and wind howling across the plain. I watched her figure calmly, her smooth limbs and sinuous arms, bracelets shivering up and down, gems flashing. Her voice was eerie, echoing in me, and beyond it, behind it, the shadow of another voice with whom she was communicating.

I knew who this would be.

I sang against that distant song most powerfully, my voice in the air and in the plane of the fifth circle where I knew to find him;
I sang Yron has come, oh you lord of shadow
, and I could feel his distant confusion. Uncertain who or what I might be, he hesitated. When the link between those two was weakened I could feel the jolt in Julassa Kyminax, the faltering of dance and thought. Moving quickly toward her, I broke the ward she had been setting and drove her back with fire and other applications. But the wards she had already set remained fixed and she took refuge behind them.

She was holding gems in her hands.

She tossed them in her loose fingers, looking above at the sky as if listening.

Now, in trance and out of my body, I expanded time and moved to the gems. A way to do so became clear to me, to move directly through a space I had never seen and to move in the kei, nowhere else, which is not motion at all, but which makes the world, as Commyna said. Ignoring her wards, I sang to her gems in a way I had never tried before, behind the Ildaruen that filled the stone, not even contesting its presence, simply refilling the gems with Wyyvisar and reaching from them to Julassa.

The effect was immediate. My head was full of her words, and I was engulfing the whole current of her thought and song, directing and molding, setting down my hand into her mind. She felt my presence and tumbled to the ground in her confusion. I felt surprised at her fear, and realized I felt no pity for her. I had thought it would be so much harder. She fought me but it was for nothing; heat and cold blasted me, and she sang death to me from three levels at once, but I had her gems, and she had nothing of mine. The memory of my father flooded me, and my sisters and brothers dead on our farm, and my mother imprisoned.

I set my wards round her all at once and their power filled the gems. She struggled to break the circle but could not, and I fixed it in place and she was mine. I imposed no Bans. There could be no question of mercy. She could not live to return to her master. Before I killed her I let her know who I was, the son of the farmer she had slaughtered. She was dismayed and angered and fought me off for a time, but I was still in her gems even from that distance, she could not win. I said a magic of unmaking and fire poured from her, the ground trembled beneath her death spasm, splitting the walls of Gnemorra so that Lady Karsten and her soldiers could pour through the breech. Julassa’s cries could be heard to the end of Aeryn, by those who had ears to hear. I ate her life and strength as was my right. No part of her was left to be reborn, in Zaeyn, beyond the Gates of the Dead. Her defeat was no secret from anybody. That day Drudaen knew he was opposed in the north, by a power he had not reckoned on.

When the fight was done I stood forlorn on the plain beneath the storm that would go on raging, the darkness that would slowly dissipate. From the fortress resounded the cries of soldiers dying. Red Cloaks poured through the gap in the wall.

On the plain round about lay the bodies of those who had already fallen, and I wandered there briefly, dazed, hearing the groans of those to whom the sword had not been quite kind enough. Some few of them I sang into sleep or numbness, till I realized in a daze that I hadn’t strength to comfort them all. My heart flooded with misery. I had killed my enemy but I had also broken a vow to the Sisters of the YY. Victory had an uncertain taste. I summoned Nixva as we had been taught at Illyn Water, and he came to me out of the smoke and blackness, rain sheeting down across his glossy coat. I mounted into the saddle and we returned to Arthen, following the way we came.

1

By the time I reached camp darkness had long since descended, and I found the shrine tent empty, Axfel asleep at the rear flap, whimpering in a dream. I said his name and he sprang on me, licking my face, yelping his delight.

I hurried indoors to the work chamber, where I set about putting to rights my neglect of Evening Ceremony. I lit the kaa lamp in the shrine and sang the Evening Song quietly. When the lamp was lit and placed in its appropriate niche, the night did not seem so strange.