Land of the Burning Sands (27 page)

Gereint hesitated. Then nudged his mare up beside Beguchren’s and asked at last, “We’re not stopping?”

Beguchren didn’t even turn his head. “I do think we can at least come up to Raichboden before full dark, don’t you?”

Indeed, no. Gereint shrugged and said instead, “All right. We’ll press on to the inn at the ferry landing: fine. Then we’ll go through Pamnarichtan by midmorning tomorrow, I suppose; reach Metichteran sometime in the afternoon, be in Tashen by supper time. Unless I decide to settle on the riverbank at Raichboden and fish instead.”

There was a pause. Then Beguchren, turning his head at last, asked softly, “Do you think you’re likely to do that?”

Gereint gazed at the ears of his mare. He did not look up. He didn’t want to see Beguchren’s unbreakable composure—but, if he had managed to disturb that composure, he didn’t want to see that either. “You won’t tell me what you want me to do for you until we reach the desert. But will you tell me
why
you won’t tell me now?”

There was no response.

“You won’t. You think if you tell me now, I’d turn this pretty black mare and ride back down the river road as fast as she can take me, though after a day as long as this, I don’t suppose that’s all that fast. I don’t know why the possibility concerns you, since you can use magecraft to hold me. Do you simply not want to put yourself to the trouble?”

“Gereint—”

Gereint looked over at the mage at last, a hard stare. “What will you do, my lord mage, if I fight you? You can turn the road about on me, but what if I simply sit on the riverbank and refuse to take a step? What then? Wait patiently until the season turns and the snow comes down? I hardly think so. So what would you do?”

Begurchren checked his mare, twisted in the saddle to give Gereint his full attention, and leaned on the pommel, frowning. “Gereint… please don’t fight me.”

“You put that as a request, but it’s a threat.” Gereint, perforce, had brought his horse to a halt as well. It mouthed the bit uncomfortably, and he found he was gripping the reins too tightly. He made his hands relax, with an effort.

“Not at all,” Beguchren said mildly.

“A warning, then. Or will you tell me it’s an appeal?”

“That’s closer.”

“Which?” But there was no response to that. Gereint shook his head. “You wanted a man ‘with a great capacity for loyalty.’ But why? It isn’t loyalty you’re after from me. You said you don’t want the forced obedience of the
geas.
But that’s exactly what you do want—only without the
geas.
”

“No. It’s true that that’s what I have now. But it’s not what I want.”

The urge to say
Yes, all right, I’m sure it will be fine. Don’t bother yourself about it
was amazingly strong. Gereint shuddered with the effort to control that urge. For half a shaved copper coin, he would have whirled his horse around and ridden away—heading anywhere. Except such an attempt would not work. And he could not even bring himself to wish it would. “Are you doing this to me? Stop it!”

“I can’t. I’m not precisely doing it.” Beguchren paused, stroking his mare’s neck as it fidgeted. He went on after a moment: “You’re feeling the pull of a natural affinity. In a way, it’s similar to the
geas.
I’m sure you feel the likeness. That’s one reason it disturbs you. But this, unlike the
geas
, you can overrule, if you wish. You’re overruling it now.”

Gereint shook his head, trying not only to understand what the mage was saying but also to clear his mind. This wasn’t at all like the
geas
; Beguchren was wrong about that. It was more like an inexplicable impulse, despite everything, toward trust. “Is this why you wanted this slow journey together, just you and me? To let this ‘affinity’ develop?”

“What does Andreikan Warichteier say in his
Principia
about the relationship between mages and their students? About how men become mages?”

Faced with these academic questions, Gereint found himself steadying—and knew Beguchren had asked them for that purpose—and couldn’t even resent him for it, though he wanted to. Or felt that he ought to want to. He said, “Less than I wish he had, now. I’m not any kind of mage or potential mage—”

“How do you know?”

Gereint said, as quietly as the mage but with so much intensity that he might have shouted, “If you’re so powerful, then whatever I am, skilled maker or poor excuse for a mage,
what do you need me for
?”

“I’ll tell you once we reach—”

“The country of fire! Yes, so you say! You’ll tell me, it will be something terrible, I’ll refuse, and you’ll force me to do it anyway—”

Beguchren held up a hand, shaking his head. “No, Gereint, there you are wrong, I promise you. What I will need you to do for me is nothing I or anyone else can force you to do. Or the
geas
would have sufficed.”

Gereint controlled, barely, an impulse to fling himself down from the saddle and stride away into the woods. His hands were shaking, he found, and he closed them hard around the reins to hide the fact. He said tightly, “Why did you free me? To coax me to trust you? Did you think that likely to work?”

“Under these circumstances? No.”

Gereint waited. But Beguchren did not explain, only started his horse moving again, gently, upriver. Gereint’s mare followed without any signal from him.

Gereint shook his head. He said grimly, “Warichteier says that like calls to like, and that there’s a natural affinity between mages and natural creatures of earth. You seem to believe I might be some sort of mage. I hope you haven’t set all your hopes on that. I’m only a maker. But I’ll stop fighting you. All right? I won’t fight you, my lord mage. I’ll go north as far as you wish, as fast as you wish. But I don’t believe for a moment you don’t intend to force me to fit your need. Whatever that may be.”

Beguchren hesitated, his eyes on his mare’s neck. He began to speak, then stopped, hunting for words. At last he lifted his gaze and began, “Gereint, necessity can bind a man more tightly than any
geas.
Magecraft,” said Beguchren, “like any magic, is a natural quality. Warichteier was half right, but only half. A mage is… a point of focus in the world. A point where forces balance and pivot. Any mage is like that, though earth and fire mages balance different and opposing forces. When we study, what we learn is to notice what we’re doing to the world and, hmm, how to bend in the right direction the pull we always exert, do you see? For all his learning, Warichteier was not a mage and he did not really understand magecraft. That is why his commentary on the subject is so opaque and not altogether accurate.”

“A cold mage—”

“We say ‘cold mage’ when in a sense we mean merely ‘a mage trained to oppose fire.’ But if an earth mage develops his… inclination… to oppose fire, he gives up certain kinds of power in order to emphasize certain other kinds. Do you understand?”

Gereint didn’t, but didn’t like to say so, lest Beguchren realize he was speaking almost freely and stop.

“To be sure,” Beguchren added, “an ordinary earth mage must give up certain kinds of, hmm, power as well. Whereas a gifted maker such as yourself is not any sort of mage: A gift is different in kind from magecraft. However—” He lifted a hand—to gesture, to demonstrate something, it was not clear. Because a short little hunting arrow flicked through the air not a hair’s width from the mage’s fingers and disappeared with a wicked little hiss into the dark river, and two more sank, humming, into the earth at their horses’ feet.

Gereint would not have thought there was enough light left for shooting. Clearly there was. Mouth dry and heart pounding, he checked his horse. Beguchren had drawn up as well, peering into the dusky woods with no great alarm so far as Gereint could see. Another arrow whipped past in front of them. Gereint lifted his hands to show they were empty and muttered under his breath, “I thought this was
perfectly safe
?”

“It is,” Beguchren replied seriously. “Or nearly. Shh. Don’t frighten them away.” As Gereint wondered how exactly either of them could possibly frighten away a troop of brigands—frown sternly at them?—the smaller man also held his empty hands out in token of surrender.

Gereint said grimly, “If that first one was a warning shot, it came remarkably close to hitting you—and if they just want to stay under cover and shoot us both, I don’t know what’s stopping them—”

“They might intend to take me as a hostage,” suggested Beguchren. He didn’t sound overly concerned about the prospect. “Perhaps someone among them has realized that they might send to my family to demand a rich ransom.”

Gereint stared at him. “You believe they’ll think that far ahead, with the men-at-arms of all the northern towns beating through the woods for them? I hope you have some way to protect us besides depending on the reluctance of murderous dog-livered cutthroat brigands to shoot us out of hand.”

Beguchren gave him a look.

“Well, you haven’t been very quick to show it, if you do!”

“Gereint, I should think you, of all men, had learned patience?”

“You might think so,” Gereint muttered, and saw Beguchren’s mouth twitch toward a smile. If the brigands hidden in the woods saw that smile, he thought, then if they had a thimbleful of sense among them, they’d sneak away from this camp as quietly as they’d come and not stop running till they hit the edge of the desert… Maybe they had. There was certainly no sound from the woods, and no more arrows. “Where
are
they?” he asked again.

“I think…” murmured Beguchren. “Yes, I rather think they are coming out now.”

This was true. The brigands had finally decided that their quarry were truly at bay, and were slowly coming out into the moonlight. One, and then another, and then a third—all with bows—another, armed more simply with a club. A fifth man, and a sixth. “Not eager to close in, though,” observed Gereint.

“You probably frighten them.”

Gereint almost laughed. “Bows?” he reminded the smaller man.

“I don’t suppose they’d have turned to brigandage if they were brave men—” But Beguchren fell silent as the men finally began to approach. There were eight altogether. Only three had bows—though three were certainly enough. The rest carried clubs. To Gereint, they looked alarmingly ready to use those clubs. Even eager. They looked warily at Gereint, but their glowers were directed toward Beguchren.

“It’s my size,” the mage murmured. “A certain sort of man resents wealth in a man smaller than he is. If you were the one wearing the rings, they’d still be planning to kill you, but they wouldn’t feel they had to break all your bones first.”

Gereint gave the smaller man an incredulous glance. “Of course they would. They resent me just for being bigger than they are, whether or not I’m wearing a lot of sapphires. I hope you have something in mind other than appealing to their generous natures.”

“Do you think that’s all of them?”

“All who are going to come out, at least.”

Beguchren nodded. “I think so, too.”

The leader of the brigands, a man nearly as broad across the shoulders as Gereint, hefted his club. He had a mean look to him, like a scared dog that nevertheless meant to bite. If he intended to take Beguchren as a hostage and let Gereint go in order to collect a ransom, it wasn’t apparent at the moment. He looked a lot more like he meant to beat them both to death himself. He looked them over, then said, in a growling, contemptuous tone, “Where’d you hide the rest of it?”

Beguchren shook his head in gentle puzzlement. “The rest of—?”

The man gestured again with his club. “Those rings can’t be all you’ve got. You’re stupid, but you can’t be
that
stupid. Everybody knows to hide their money.” He flicked the club back and forth mockingly. “Get down off that horse, little dog-lord, and tell me where you put it. In the saddle cloth? The saddle? Huh?”

“I guess they’re not thinking about hostages,” Gereint murmured, glancing down at the mage. “If you’re going to do something, now might be a good—” He stopped.

Beguchren had reached out across the distance that separated his horse from Gereint’s and taken hold of Gereint’s arm. He gripped hard, not as though he sought support, but more as though he needed to mark Gereint’s position. He was gazing at nothing, his expression abstracted. After a moment, both the packed earth of the road and the black river that had been all but hidden in the dusk began to shimmer with a pale, cold radiance like moonlight through winter fog. The air chilled, as though the seasons had suddenly shifted forward straight to winter, passing through the rest of summer and all of autumn in an eye-blink. The pale light grew steadily brighter, though no warmer.

Most of the brigands simply gaped. Two of them started to edge back toward the woods, but they stopped before they had retreated more than a few steps.

Like moonlight, the cold light of the stones was gentle to the eyes. Though it was bright enough to cast shadows, Gereint did not need to squint through the light to glance at Beguchren’s face. The mage looked perfectly calm and quite unmoved. The pearly radiance filled the whole road between river and woods. Like moonlight, the cold magelight stripped color from the world it revealed. The white feet of the horses gleamed like lanterns in the cool light; they sidled and backed, but did not panic. Gereint would have liked to panic himself, but did not dare. He reached out quickly to catch Beguchren’s reins, afraid of what might happen if the two horses moved apart and the mage lost his hold on Gereint’s arm. The tangled branches and leaves of the woods were black and dense; the river, rimed with ice at its near edge, glinted an almost metallic silver.