Lords of the Sky (50 page)

Would it, though?
she wondered as she sank herself in the tub.
The keep sorcerers fight when the Sky Lords ground their boats, so what difference? Either way men die.

She began to wash hair matted with blood, coated with ash, watching the water change color.
Perhaps,
she mused,
it’s to do with the crystal Or to do with me, solely. Perhaps I’m not the stuff from which true patriots are fashioned. Perhaps I’ve not the stomach for war and should be no better as a commur-mage. Perhaps I listened too close to Daviot, when he spoke of our driving the Ahn from
their
homeland. When he spoke of—no! I’ll not think of him.

Angry with herself, she rose to find the pump and sluice her body. It was always, she realized, after she had linked with the crystal that she thought the most of Daviot, dreamed the more. It was as though the stone opened some portal to grant memory better ingress. She dried herself (thinking it was near pointless in such heat) and tugged on a clean gown. She was hungry, and there would be company in the refectory to alleviate her megrims.

When she found it, the long room was already crowded: such magic as had been used today edged the appetite. Rwyan “saw” Gwyllym—like her, fresh bathed—deep in conversation with Cyraene and Gynael, Chiara listening even as her eyes wandered. The blond woman saw Rwyan and waved, indicating a place beside her. Rwyan smiled, somewhat tentatively, and nodded, making her way across the room. She hoped that with more senior sorcerers present, Chiara would not babble as usual about the day’s events, not evince such bloodthirsty fervor. She wondered if she grew testy: in Durbrecht she had not thought of Chiara’s chatter as babbling. Likely, she decided as she joined them, it was because Chiara found such pleasure in those things Rwyan herself found distasteful. She supposed they both had changed since coming here. She held her smile in place, aware that otherwise she might have scowled, as Chiara greeted her eagerly, already speaking of the fight.

“Better than a score, so Gwyllym says; and all but five destroyed. I wish to the God I’d been with you.”

Rwyan waved that one of that day’s servitors bring her ale and food. “Do you?” she asked. “It was not very pleasant. I’ve been washing off Kho’rabi blood.”

“Dark blood that can no longer threaten Dharbek,” said Chiara fiercely. “Like battle honors.”

Rwyan fought irritation. “Poor Waende was drenched,” she said, looking around. “Is she here? Is she well?”

Gynael said, “She’s abed. Not hungry, she says, and somewhat disturbed. Marthyn gave her a sleeping draught.”

“Best she not take a watch for a while,” said Gwyllym. “But you, Rwyan, are you well?”

“Save for a burned gown.” She smiled. She’d not say here she felt unclean. “Save for that, aye.”

“Good.” He nodded kindly. “Me, I’ve an appetite after that squabble.”

“How,” asked Chiara, “can you name it a squabble?”

“Easily.” Gwyllym chuckled, catching Rwyan’s eye and winking. “Now, shall we speak of gentler matters?”

Chiara was about to protest, but Cyraene patted her hand and bade her quiet. Rwyan could not decide whether she wanted to laugh or shake her friend as Chiara pouted, but at least she obeyed her lover, and the conversation moved away from the fight.

Not far: it was difficult to avoid discussion of the Sky Lords, of their newfound magic, and the likely imminence of the Great Coming.

None there doubted its approach; the sole question was when, and on that opinions differed. Rwyan favored no one opinion over another. Sometimes, secretly, she entertained the wish that somehow there be a peace forged; but that was surely no more than idle indulgence: the Dhar would not give back the land taken from the Ahn, any more than the Sky Lords would relinquish their claim. Not willingly; not without it be forced on them both. And how should that be accomplished?

Unless,
came the errant thought,
Daviot’s dreams be true, and we find the dragons and make them our allies.

“Rwyan?” Gwyllym’s voice intruded on her musing. “Where do you go, Rwyan?”

Before she could shape a reply, Chiara said, “Dreaming again! Of whom, Rwyan?”

“I thought,” she said, favoring her friend with a glare, “that it were better to end this war before too many die.”

“Were there a way, aye.” Gwyllym nodded soberly, his craggy face grave. “But there is no way; not that I can see.”

“Destroy the Sky Lords!” Chiara’s pretty face became a harpy’s mask, her voice strident. “Send every one of their God-cursed skyboats down in flames! Build boats of our own, to take the battle to them and lay waste their land!”

Her hands clenched in angry fists; her blue eyes flashed. Rwyan heard Gwyllym sigh, thinking he grew as bored with Chiara’s fanaticism as she. Even Cyraene looked askance at she younger woman.

Gynael said, “You know we cannot build such boats. We can only endeavor to destroy theirs.”

Her tone was soft, as if she delivered a reprimand to a willful child. Chiara turned defiant eyes on the silver-haired woman, lips parting to reply. Before she had chance to speak, Cyraene took her hand, still fisted, and patted gently. “Little one,” she murmured, “you must learn to curb that ardor. You waste your anger, dreaming of what cannot be. We’ve our magic; they, theirs—so it is, and we must accept at.”

For a moment, Chiara seemed about to argue, but then she nodded, her flushed cheeks paling. Rwyan was surprised Cyraene could affect her so; and grateful, for she was in no mood to suffer another eruption. Mildly, she said, “Were it only possible to speak with the Kho’rabi. Perhaps …”

Chiara interrupted with a snort laden with contempt. “You listened too much to Daviot, Rwyan. His mad dreams taint you. I give you Cyraene’s advice—leave off dreaming of what cannot be.”

Rwyan shrugged agreement, not wishing to fuel argument. Tempers grew short in such heat, and likely Chiara was right: Daviot had seeded an idea in her, and likely it was wild as the notion of Dhar airboats, or living dragons.

“Gently, gently.” Gwyllym’s tone was moderate, but beneath lay the steel of authority. “Could we build skyboats, aye—but we cannot. Could we speak with the Sky Lords, aye—but we cannot. We can only do our duty, and that shall be hard do we quarrel amongst ourselves.”

Rwyan said, “Forgive me,” thinking she had done little to warrant apology. Still, she’d not lose Chiara’s friendship, for all the woman grew tiresome.
Had I such vehemence,
she thought,
I’d likely be happier. Surely I’d not entertain such doubts as plague me.

Almost, she smiled at that—another impossibility—but she held her face solemn, attentive again as Gynael said slowly, “Upward of a score, Gwyllym? Why so many, think you?”

The big man shrugged, rough-hewn features expressing incomprehension.

Gynael lowered her wrinkled face as if in thought. “As many came against every one of the Sentinels, and as many were felled. Would they make such a sacrifice? It seems costly to me.”

“The Sky Lords count lives cheap,” said Cyraene.

“True,” Gynael said, her hoarse voice contemplative. “But even so, it seems to me a terrible waste. It prompts me to wonder if all their scouting is not done. If they’ve garnered all the knowledge of Dharbek they need.” She smiled sadly. “I think that what we saw today was a testing; perhaps the last. We’ve seen none of the great vessels in a year or more; nor lately the little skyboats. Now, of a sudden, they come like flies to a midden. Why should that be, think you?”

Her rheumy eyes found Rwyan’s face, and as none other spoke, Rwyan said, “They’d know what magicks we command. Discover if we’ve learned aught to defeat them this past year.”

“I think it so,” said Gynael. “I think they sacrifice their little boats to gain that knowledge.”

Beside her, Rwyan felt Chiara stiffen and “saw” her hand find Cyraene’s. The dark-haired woman’s face was paled; her sharp white teeth worried her lower lip. Across the table Gwyllym sat with clouded visage, his eyes intent on Gynael. His deep voice was a rumble as he said, “The Great Coming.”

“I’d guess it so.” Gynael nodded, then smiled as if amused by their expressions. “Why such startled faces? Is this not what we expected?”

Aye,
Rwyan thought,
it is. But to expect a thing and to face it are not the same. We are not ready; we’ve not the magic.

“I’d thought,” said Cyraene, her voice hushed, “to have more time. To find the key to defeating their magic …”

Her words tailed off. Gwyllym vented a bass chuckle devoid of humor. “As the seasons they send against us,” he murmured, “so the clock runs faster.”

“Too fast,” whispered Cyraene.

That night, Rwyan dreamed she flew. She sat astride a great winged creature that was simultaneously incorporeal and substantial. She felt the beat of massive wings, the rise
and fall of vast ribs, the rush of air that washed her face and streamered her hair, but she could not see the beast. No matter how hard she tried, she could not quite capture its image, so that even as she knew she hurtled through a sky darkening to star-pocked night, borne aloft by what she knew must be a dragon, she felt she was alone, upheld by nothing more than a dream. She grew afraid then, thinking that she must tumble down to the sea below. And Daviot was there, before her, her arms about his waist, her cheek rested snug against his back. She raised her face to nuzzle his hair, and he turned, smiling confidently.

He said, “You see? The dragons live still.”

And she asked, “Where do we go?”

He pointed ahead, and Rwyan saw they had flown through the night, the darkness gone, replaced by the rising sun lifting from a horizon spread with three mountainous islands.

She asked, “Is that not the domain of the Sky Lords?” And he answered only, “Aye.”

Then, from one island, there rose a skyboat, rushing toward them. Rwyan saw the sigils glowing malign along the flanks of the bloodred cylinder and heard the eerie singing of the elementals. In the black basket beneath the cylinder, she saw the glint of sun on metal as bows were drawn. She felt the Kho’rabi wizards summon their magicks to send against her, against Daviot, and readied her own, unsure her strength should be enough to defeat so many.

She said, “Daviot, I’m afraid.”

And he answered her, “What other choice is there?”

Rwyan woke then, the question still loud inside her head. She could not understand it; nor, all that day, could she forget it. She told no one, for she could not believe any on the island should own the answer; and it was, after all, only a dream.

In the tense days that followed, the dream returned nightly, always the same, unchanged and inexplicable. Rwyan set it aside as best she could and endeavored to concentrate on her duties. That was no easy task, for like all on the island, she waited on the summons to battle. When she walked abroad, she was not alone in looking often at the sky, and all the time that part of her attuned to the minds around
her listened for the call that should send her to the tower and the crystal, to war.

One night a storm arose and she neither dreamed nor slept very much for the crash of thunder and the vivid illumination of the lightning that danced across the sky. She dared hope the tempest was herald of the occult summer’s ending, but she was disappointed: the heat did not abate, and the next morning the air was again cloying, the sun a baleful eye overhead.

Then, when the storm was gone as if it, too, had been only a dream, her life was irrevocably changed.

T
he sun, although barely a handspan above the horizon, transformed the sky to a sheet of flawless blue silvered by the rising heat. The boundary line separating the heavens from the unbroken surface of the ocean was indiscernible, air and water merging in burnished union. No motion of waves disturbed the one, nor cloud the other: only the shimmering blue existed, fierce as a furnace, painful to observe and soul-destroyingly empty. The coruscating glory of the dawn was a brief memory, the interim between darkness and day burned off in an eye’s blink, like gossamer feather fallen in fire. What little cool the night had brought was gone as swiftly, replaced by the intensity of the ascending sun.

The man turned slitted eyes from his observation to study the rock on which he lay, optimism flaring and dying as swiftly as the dawn. It had not changed since he had last seen it, despite his hope that he was somehow, in some manner he could not comprehend, caught in a dream that would end with the night. That forlorn solace evaporated as he cast his eyes—what color were they? he wondered—over the oblong slab of unblemished white.

It was exactly as he recalled, and he knew that if he summoned the energy to rise and step out its confines, it would measure fifty paces by nineteen, slanting a little upward after the thirtieth pace, sloping about its perimeter into the ocean. That vast womb seemed to wait, patient, knowing
that in time it would have him, just as it had welcomed the bleached bones he had cast upon its waters, as much to introduce some disturbance, some leavening of the awful monotony, as to rid the stone of the empty-eyed reminders that death stood close by his shoulder. They had provided a small measure of grim amusement as he tossed them out over the featureless water, watching the splashes, wondering what features had fleshed the skulls, what musculature once decorated the bones of arms and legs, the cages of the ribs. He doubted they had been fat, not in this place; but what expressions had they worn when death reached out to touch them, telling them the time had come? He grimaced at the melancholy thought, wondering what his own would be, wondering what he looked like now.