Land of the Burning Sands (43 page)

Beguchren saw his helplessness, but the cold mage only shook his head. “I cannot help you. If you do not find the way, it was all for nothing and we will all die here: Our bones will burn to ash and blow away in the wind and the desert will lie across our rivers forever—”

“I know!” Gereint exclaimed.

Beguchren gave him a tense nod, let him go, and turned to stare down at the company of men. It was not yet quite besieged; the griffins, welcoming their human fire mage, had raised their burning wind and come at last down upon the men. But arrows flickered out into that savage wind, and spears tilted and rose, and Beguchren drove up, from the now-distant country of earth, a stinging wind that glittered with ice crystals, and so the griffins did not, as yet, close to battle.

If we do not achieve victory swiftly, we will surely be defeated
, Beguchren had said, and Gereint had understood exactly how he was expected to contribute to that victory. Now, staring instead down the sweep of the desert straight into defeat, it occurred to him for the first time that Beguchren might have meant the little company of men not only serve as a feint against the griffins, but also to drive
him
forward:
We will all die here, our bones will burn to ash and blow away in the wind
… Yes, the cold mage had brought them deliberately into peril and set all their lives in Gereint’s hands. Anger drove him, and despair. He dropped to his knees on the sand, burying his hands in it.

The sand was, in a strange way, living—not as good garden soil was living, but alive with fire. It was unalterably opposed to everything he loved; it would destroy anything of earth that it touched… The magic of earth ran through him: He knew it, tried to feel it; the effort was like trying to feel the flow of blood in his veins. It was impossible to truly feel something so integral to his body and to life.

Except that the power of earth was at such odds with the power of fire, and in the conflict that blazed between the two he almost thought he could perceive both… Rising, acting on nothing like a thought, merely on impulse borne out of terror and desperation, he reached out, jerked the knife off Beguchren’s belt, tossed the sheath aside, caught the mage’s wrist in a hard grip, gave Beguchren one instant to see his intention, and flicked the tip of the knife sharply against the palm of the mage’s hand. Then his own, and he closed his hand hard around Beguchren’s small hand, palm against palm.

It was not any kind of technique he’d ever read about or thought of, nothing that would have been useful when working with wood or stone or metal or any normal material. But he shut his eyes and defined blood as symbolic of self; Beguchren’s a cold mage’s self and his a maker’s, and he did something with their mingled blood he could never have described but more or less seemed to recognize. And then he followed the pattern he had made, or completed, or perceived. It was not a pattern he understood, but he followed it anyway, and felt his blood, or mind, or self, slide with surprising ease into that shared pattern and then follow a half-forgotten intention at last into the pattern of magecraft.

Doing so, he died. It was like death. He had not understood what it would be like: like a shattering of memory and identity, like the flowing out of his heart’s blood. He would have fought this loss if he had understood how to fight it, but it was already too late to undo it. He struggled, but it was like the struggle of a drowning man against the ripping current of a river; there was no firm ground beneath him and the air was closed away from him, unreachable… He was drowning, not in water but in a wild tide that he recognized, dimly, as magecraft. Something integral to everything he had been cracked across, and something else rose in its place, as though one building had been torn down to make room for another.

Gereint drew a hard, shuddering breath and… opened his eyes. He had not been aware of closing them.

The desert had changed. It was still starkly beautiful, stretched out under the bloody sky, reflecting the last fire of the setting sun. But it had become not merely terrible but dreadful. He shuddered uncontrollably, looking out at it: It
pressed
at him with suffocating force. It would kill him if it could, and burn his bones to ash that would blow away on the wind. It
wanted
him to die. He had felt this before, but now the sense was a hundred times stronger and somehow more personal, as though the desert almost had an actual
self
of its own that was utterly opposed to everything natural and human.

Like the desert, the griffins had become dreadful. He remembered clearly that he had found them beautiful. But now he saw that they were profoundly inimical, in a way he’d previously completely failed to understand. And the brown griffin and the once-human girl were far the worst. They appalled him. He choked on revulsion against them…

A strong, small hand closed on his shoulder and he looked up, swaying because the desert underfoot seemed to shift with anger; he thought it would burst into flame beneath him and spun a web of frozen quiet across the sand to hold it quiescent.

Then Beguchren moved to face him, set a hand on his other shoulder as well, and met Gereint’s eyes. His silver eyes were filled with ice and intensity. Without hesitation, with a skill and power that Gereint could not understand, could barely recognize, Beguchren stripped the new power from his blood and mind and self, turned, and sent a glittering net of ice and power flashing through the hot wind toward the girl and her griffin companion.

Gereint folded down to the sand, unable to brace himself up even on hands and knees. He felt not merely weakened but half blinded and deafened and all but disembodied by the loss of power; worse, he felt somehow that the world itself had been stripped of presence and reality, that what remained was nothing but an attenuated echo of the world that had surrounded him a moment earlier.

But the brown griffin staggered in the air, crying out in a high harsh voice as the icy net closed around it. The girl cried out as well, her voice high and sweet and not at all human.

And a massive griffin, black as charcoal, touched with red the color of smoldering embers, blazed out of the wind between Beguchren and the brown griffin, and Beguchren’s net shattered into shards of ice that dissolved into the fiery light of the desert sunset.

Gereint thought he shouted, but his voice was only a thin gasp.

Beside him, Beguchren made no sound at all, but turned to face the dark griffin, his expression strained and tense, his eyes filled with a pure and frozen blaze of power that had nothing to do with desert fire.

In the west, the sky burned with a crimson light as the sun sank at last beyond the fiery horizon. Then the light died, and the hard desert night crashed down around them. Yet the darkness was broken by a bloody light that seemed to emanate from the fiery wind or from the griffins themselves, and from a frosted silvery radiance that surrounded the cold mage. By that light, Gereint could see the great black griffin stoop down across the sky toward Beguchren, and he saw Beguchren take a small step backward, and it occurred to him, for the first time as a serious possibility, that the cold mage might, despite everything, simply find himself overmatched in this challenge. But Gereint did not have enough strength remaining to be afraid. The darkness closed in upon him, a greater darkness than even the desert night could impose, and his awareness spiraled down into the dark, and dissolved in it, and was gone.

T
he road between Dachsichten and Breidechboden was much too good, Tehre decided. Even if you weren’t in a great hurry, your carriage would travel smoothly and swiftly, and if you
were
in a hurry, well, you could travel very quickly indeed. Even with the very best roads, however, no one but a courier or a king’s agent could cover the whole distance from Dachsichten to Breidechboden in one day. Which was just as well, Tehre thought.

Sicheir rode his own horse, not too near Detreir Enteirich. Though Meierin rode with Tehre in the carriage, the girl was silent and pale. She sat with her hands folded primly in her lap like a child, and her gaze fixed on her hands. She evaded Tehre’s eye and said very little. Tehre was aware she should reassure the girl, but did not know what she might say. She would have liked to send her out to ride with Sicheir so that she could speak privately with Lord Bertaud, but of course that was impossible. Lord Bertaud had turned his carriage south without apparent hesitation, but his eyes were secretive and bleak, and Tehre knew his grim mood had nothing to do with fears of the Arobern’s anger.

She said at last, speaking straight across Meierin since there was no choice, “Will you go all the way back to Breidechboden?”

Lord Bertaud lifted his eyes to meet hers, but he did not answer.

“You needn’t,” Tehre said firmly. “Did I make that clear? But you need to tell me what
I
should do.”

“Lady—” Meierin said tentatively.

“Hush,” Tehre told her. She hadn’t looked away from Lord Bertaud. “You know, if you simply turned about and headed north again, there wouldn’t be anything at all the Arobern’s agent could do to prevent you.”

“He could prevent you, however,” Lord Bertaud said, frowning.

“Not necessarily, if I were with you. If he had to set himself against you, honored lord, I don’t know what he’d do. The Arobern’s agents have wide authority. But they have to use it with discretion. It would even be an act of war to raise a hand against you. Wouldn’t it?”

“And an act of treason for you to defy him. Isn’t that so?”

“Lady!” Meierin exclaimed.

“Hush!” Tehre said, more firmly this time. “Meierin, hush. Not even Fereine will blame you for anything I do, you know.”

“Yes, she will—”

“Well, tell her I said she mustn’t.” Tehre turned once more to Lord Bertaud. “Well?”

The Feierabianden lord said nothing for a long moment. His expression had become abstracted, but some of the bleakness had gone from it. Tehre said nothing, did not move, tried not even to breathe obtrusively. She heard his voice in her memory:
I think it may be worse than even your king suspects. I have a suspicion about this.

At last Lord Bertaud lifted his gaze to meet Tehre’s. He said, “What you did with language… I said you must be a mage. You said you are not. Tell me, lady, are you in truth a mage as well as a maker?”

“No,” Tehre said, surprised. “No, I’m a maker, and maybe something of an engineer, but not a mage. I’m sorry—if you need a mage, I’m afraid there aren’t any more—”

Lord Bertaud dismissed this concern with a wave of his hand. “The one remains. The king’s mage. The cold mage. Beguchren.”

“Beguchren Teshrichten,” Tehre agreed, mystified. “Yes.”

“He went north.”

“Yes?” Tehre couldn’t see where the foreign lord was heading with this. She tried to wait patiently for him to explain.

“Mages of earth and fire…” Lord Bertaud began, and stopped.

“There is an antipathy,” Tehre said cautiously. “All the philosophers agree there is an antipathy.”

“Yes.” Lord Bertaud’s mouth tightened. His gaze had turned inward. Whatever he was seeing, Tehre thought, it was not the interior of the carriage or the neat fields that lined the road. He turned to her with sudden decision. “You’re very powerful. But you are not a mage.”

Tehre nodded to each statement, baffled.

“Your king should have sent you north. Not his mage, but you. And me, perhaps. Well, we shall see what this Detreir Enteirich does with his authority and his discretion,” Lord Bertaud declared, and leaned forward to speak to his driver.

Detreir Enteirich appeared beside the carriage almost before it had completed its turn. “Stop!” he ordered the driver. But the driver was one of Lord Bertaud’s retainers and not Casmantian at all, and he did not stop, but instead clucked to the horses and made them trot more briskly than ever. Northward.

“Lord Bertaud!” the king’s agent said, falling back to ride alongside the carriage so he could speak to them through the window.

“I said I would escort the lady wherever she might wish to go,” Lord Bertaud said blandly. “It appears she wishes to go north.”

The agent digested this for a moment. Then he leaned down a little in the saddle, peering past Lord Bertaud to Tehre. “Lady Tehre—”

“Yes, I know,” said Tehre.

“This defiance is treason, lady—”

Yes
, Tehre began to repeat. But agreeing made it seem more real, and she found herself flinching from the word. She said instead, almost pleadingly, “But the Arobern gave me the wrong command. He’s given me the wrong command twice! I don’t
want
to defy the king, truly, but he should have told me to go north. We have in Lord Bertaud someone who’s even allied to the griffins, and the Arobern won’t listen to him, either!”