Lesson of the Fire (13 page)

She held out the wand to him in offering,
glancing sideways at her two companions, whose looks were dubious
even if they knew whom she represented.

Perhaps even more so because of whom and
what I represent.

She glanced at the swamp around her. Gobbels
stood in every direction. They had wide, flat noses and lips that
curled up in a permanent snarl that revealed their sharp teeth. It
was no wonder the Mar considered them both aggressive and stupid.
Katla knew better. They had learned how to fight Mar over the last
several centuries. She noted the characteristic tactics.

They stood in groups of no more than ten or
twenty, none more than a hundred feet from each other nor nearer
than fifty. It was a formation that allowed them to forage on the
march, but more importantly, it made it difficult for a wizard to
attack more than one group at a time. In battle against weards, the
members of each group would scatter. Now, they were all watching.
All muttering.

Listening. Waiting for one of us to make a
mistake.

If the wizards attacked, gobbel spears would
be in the air too quickly to gather myst for teleportation. The
edge Katla walked with Arnora and Ketil was sharp.

After a long pause, the big gobbel nodded
and motioned to his bodyguards — eight thick-armed warriors dressed
in rust-colored fox pelts. One of them stepped forward to take the
wand from her hand. He pointed it at a small kalysut and touched
the mark on the twig.

A jet of flame engulfed one branch of the
tree, reducing its leaves to ash.

The leader of the gobbels nodded and
laughed, shouting to the gobbels all around. The cry was taken up,
echoing through the trees. Several thousand gobbels surged forward.
Katla saw Arnora’s face whiten and her knees buckle as several
passed close to her.

“Well?” Arnora hissed, coming closer to
Katla.

Katla spoke in Middling
Gien,
“Stay here with the gobbels. I will
bolster the perimeter defenses in case the gobbels try to betray
us.”

“What did you say?” Ketil asked.

Arnora sniffed in disgust. “Do not tell me
you cannot speak Middling Gien!”

He shrugged. “Read? Yes. Speak? That is not
so easy.”

Katla frowned at him, trying to think of
another way to get her point across without undoing her
negotiations with the gobbels. “You’ll find that many of our allies
speak Mar quite well. Be polite to them.”

“
What are your
instructions, Weard Duxpite?”
Arnora
asked in Middling Gien.

Katla smiled slightly and
matched languages.
“Do not underestimate
the gobbels, and do not do anything that will provoke them. They
will eventually lose. Do not be here when the wizards defeat
them.”

“
Will the gobbels blame us for their
defeat and kill us?”

“
The gobbels will flee when the day is
lost. The Mardux’s magocrats will accuse you of treason against
Marrishland, however, and you must admit they have a pretty
convincing case.”

“
Thank you for the
warning, Weard Duxpite,”
Arnora said,
and she sounded like she meant it.
“I will
keep Volund’s son under control.”

Katla nodded and disappeared into the
Tempest. Instead of returning directly to the Flasten border,
however, she went to the ochres. Katla found them easier to
persuade than the gobbels had been. Of course their wands would be
more effective against wizards — counterspell wands to tear down
the perimeter defenses. Ochres were intelligent enough to grasp the
implications.

Chapter 11

“
It is not the goal of this Academy to
teach Mar to use magic. The truest measure of a weard is not what
he knows, but what he is capable of teaching himself. At my
Academy, you young men and women will learn how to learn. Those of
you who master learning might decide to take the next step, which
is to learn how to teach others to learn.”

— Nightfire Tradition,

Apprentice Addresses

Sven sat on the Chair overlooking the
seasonal meeting of the Council. “What is the next order of
business? Yes, Dux Verlren?”

“We estimate forty thousand gobbels have
breached our eastern perimeter,” Yver Verlren, the Dux of Piljerka,
explained as though the spring rains had come a little early.

“How did they get past your border
defenses?” the Dux of Skrem asked as though this was of purely
academic interest to him.

“That is unknown at this time, Dux Zaghaf,”
Yver said. “We are investigating, but many of my frontier magocrats
have not responded to our inquiries.”

“Is there any chance they abandoned their
posts, Dux Verlren?” Volund asked with a concerned expression.

Yver shook his head. “More likely, their
towns have already fallen, although I’m surprised more did not
teleport away.”

The dux of Flasten managed a sympathetic
smile. “You know frontier wizards. They always insist on being the
last to retreat.”

Sven studied Volund. The
timing of this attack was too perfect, and based on his response,
Volund seemed clearly involved with it.
But how had Volund convinced thousands of gobbels to attack
Piljerka?

Brack,
he realized, glancing sideways at Katla.
No one else has any sway over the Drakes.

She gave no sign of recognition.

Perhaps the old bogeyman was trying to make
the Mass seem real.

“Do you need our assistance?” Sven asked
Yver.

“Only your forbearance, Mardux. I am sending
a thousand of my magocrats to break the invasion, so Piljerka may
be slower in paying next season’s tribute than I would like.”

“I believe that is acceptable,” Sven told
him. “Does anyone on this Council have any objections? Yes, Dux
Ratsell?”

Sven had a raging headache long before the
negotiations ended. Wasfal was not as wealthy as Domus or Pidel,
but it had ready access to more trade goods than any of the other
landlocked duxies — a fact it used to its advantage. Every duxy
owed money to Gruber Ratsell, every dux’s debt secured by the sworn
pledge of hundreds or even thousands of its magocrats. If the duxy
defaulted on the debt, those magocrats became Wasfal’s slaves for
eight years.

Several other items of business came to the
Council, but Sven found nothing interesting about any of it. When
Nightfire, Katla and the duxes ran out of topics, Sven stood up
from the Chair.

“I have one more order of business before
this meeting of the Council ends. I propose an amendment to Bera’s
Unwritten Laws to allow Mar to use magic even if they lack the
prerequisite education.”

“I cannot advise against this action
strongly enough,” Katla said. “Your amendment would be a
declaration of war against the Drakes, and the Mass will move
against us.” She sounded confident, but Sven caught a flicker of
doubt in her eyes.

Or was that a wink of acknowledgment?

Sven went on. “I use the Takraf
Protectorates as an example of the changes education can have.
Disease, famine and danger have been severely diminished by my work
there. There is no reason we cannot adopt such policy throughout
the country. The quickest way to deal with this will be to teach
all Mar to use the myst.”

“Do you have any idea how many Mar would die
if the Mass came down from the Fens of Reur again?” Volund snapped.
“If we are lucky, only a few hundred thousand Mar would die in that
war. If we are not, there will be another dark age like the one
after the Empire fell.”

“Peace, Dux Feiglin,” Yver said. “We have
heard your rants before.”

“You must have a unanimous vote of the duxes
to change Bera’s Unwritten Laws, and you will never have mine.”
Volund jerked to his feet. “Mardux, you have proposed this
amendment at every meeting of the Council since you took the Chair.
No argument will get me to change my vote.” He stormed out.

Hand pressed to his temple to ward off the
headache, Sven adjourned the meeting. As he shuffled to his
offices, he smiled grimly. Volund had chosen the path Sven had laid
for him. Yver Verlren of Piljerka, Wolber Verden of Gunne and Borya
Zaghaf of Skrem always voted with him. Gruber was neatly in his
pocket if only because he needed Domus to pay its debts more than
Sven needed to repay Wasfal. Duxess Glyda Zaun of Pidel was, as
usual, an enigma. And Volund voted against Sven no matter what the
subject was.

The easiest solution was to get rid of
Flasten. Would Volund be surprised to hear, while his army was in
Piljerka, that Domus had taken the Duxy of Flasten?

And while Nightfire and Brack sat as judge
and executor of the Unwritten Laws, they had no vote on amendments
to it. As long as Sven did not break the Law, neither of them could
challenge his authority.

“I am reminded of your return to Rustiford,
Mardux.”

Sven jumped when he heard the Traveller’s
voice. He turned around and saw the man sitting on the couch in the
corner, playing with one of Asa’s toys.

“I have no time for
stories,” Sven said and coughed. He surprised himself by sitting
heavily in his chair.
A cough? When was
the last time I was sick?

“You are pushing yourself too hard. Your
wife and daughter miss you.”

“Do not mention them. It is too much you
know who and where they are.”

Energy made the fire blaze high in the
hearth and lit all the candles. Power shuffled books and papers,
rolled maps and charts in a swirl of paper until the desk was
clear. Sven fell into a fit of coughing.

“Perhaps it will cheer you up,” Pondr said,
and began.

Sven’s glared at the fire, but his eyelids
drooped, and his mind followed the story.

* * *

Sven stepped out of the underbrush and into
the clear area that surrounded Rustiford’s palisade. He took a deep
breath, inhaling the faint whiff of hearth smoke. He had almost
forgotten that smell he had left behind eight long years ago.
Smelling it now made him nervous. Even more than the fear he would
not recognize the people he grew up with, Sven feared they wouldn’t
recognize him or wouldn’t trust him. That dread sat in his stomach
like a lump of cold clay.

He had been a different person then. The
wizards of Nightfire’s Academy called him Sven Takraf, but here
they would still remember him as Gematsud after his mother — the
name his father had taken for love of her. He pulled the green
cloak of a first-degree wizard tighter around his shoulders as
Heliotosis, the north wind, tugged at it, and walked calmly toward
the palisade gate.

“Halt, wizard,” called a voice from behind
the palisade. Sven recognized it as Glum’s — a boy two years his
junior. “Who’re you, an’ why’re you here?”

No longer a boy,
Sven corrected himself.
All my peers and playmates are adults, now.

“I’m Sven Gematsud, son of Pitt Gematsud.
I’ve returned after eight years of enslavement to the wizard known
as Nightfire.”

“You don’t look like Sven.” Glum sounded
suspicious. “Don’t soun’ like him, either.”

Sven set his jaw. He couldn’t say he hadn’t
expected something like this. Eight years was a long time,
especially when you spent it at a wizard’s academy while your
friends spent it fighting to survive in a small town in ravit
territory.

He forced himself to revert to his old
dialect, the one Weard Kruste had all but flayed out of him. “Brin’
my father to the gate. He’ll remem’er me.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s dead.”

Sven would have been less shocked to find
his hometown under siege by gobbels or occupied by an army of
Flasten magocrats. Grief and regret washed over him, as well as
completely irrational anger.

“How?” he asked, surprised by how cool and
steady his voice sounded.

“Ravit attack. He took a dart i’the back,
an’ poison killed him.”

Just like that,
Sven thought, numb.
That’s how we live out here. How I used to live. No time to
care if we’re ignorant, uneducated and poor. It is enough that we
are alive at all.

“Who’s at the gate?” asked a second voice
from within the walls.

“Some wizard says he’s Sven Gematsud.”

“Finn!” Sven shouted. “Finn, tell him I’m
tellin’ the truth.”

“Is he?” Glum asked.

A new eye peered through the lookout hole.
“Yeah. Open the gate, Glum.”

“But he’s … ”

“He’s comin’ home like th’others did. We’ve
been over this. Open it.”

A bolt moved and the wooden gate swung open
to reveal a much larger Rustiford than Sven remembered.

Finn’s unshaven face regarded him. Sven saw
tension there, but among all the other faces that peered at him
from the doors and windows of nearby houses, Finn’s was the
friendliest.

“Are the others here?” Sven asked. The town
was larger, but seemed less well-kept than he remembered. He could
smell the foulness of refuse mingled with the hearth smoke, and his
nose wrinkled. He had forgotten about that.

“No,” Finn said as the gate swung shut
behind them. “You aren’t welcome here anymore.”

“Why?”

Finn pointed at the green cloak. “We’ve paid
our debt. We’re done with wizards.”

“Then why let me in at all?” Sven asked,
suddenly conscious of the number of people who had come out of
their houses. Many of them held spears and knives at the ready.

Merciful Niminth, I can’t
fight that many.
Not that he wanted to
fight any of them. Many of the faces were faded memories, but some
of the voices were all too familiar.
Maybe
if I run.
He searched for holes in the
crowd and found none large enough.