Moving Water (31 page)

began to speak.

“Your sister. . . .”

My eyes flew up, Zyr had blanched a mottled whiteish pink. Beryx's eyes were black in a bloodless face. I knew what he wanted to say, and that no words were adequate.

He got up, tottered up, a hand to his head. “Think,” he said thickly. “Must think. . . .” And walking through us as if we were not there he vanished into the scrub.

* * * * *

The sun climbed, the Ulven appeared and dissolved and reappeared. The day crept on. We offered our futile sympathy to Zyr, and he wrought with his grief. Zem and Zam, looking scared and queasy, had drawn in close to me. Recalling their gift, I could not stop myself asking, “Can you. . . .” And Zam nodded, and gripped his lips together. But he did not speak.

It was mid-afternoon before the scrub rustled, and Beryx, slow and bent as a cripple, made his way out.

His face was pale, with shadow-like bruises round the eyes, he had that shrunken look of a critically wounded man, and he moved as if he had met some adversary beyond even an aedr's strength. His eyes found Zyr, and flinched away. Then he came slowly to the middle of the camp, and nerved himself to speak.

“I put a Ruanbraxe on . . . all your kin. All I could find.” He forced his eyes back to Zyr. “If I'd thought . . . if I'd done it sooner . . . I'll never forgive myself.”

And that, I knew, was gospel truth.

Zyr answered very steadily, “Not your fault, sir.” Iron came into his voice. “It's hers.”

Beryx shut his eyes a moment. A cold rill shot down my spine. I could tell he was steeling himself for other, more dreadful news.

“Rema. The maid. Your. . . .” His voice was ragged, just audible. “I had it wrong. . . . Not revenge.” He dragged in a breath. “It's the next . . . offensive. In here . . . we can't be reached. So—we have to be brought out.”

We stared. He seemed to shrink on himself.

“By—by—using . . . hostages.”

Understanding, then vivid horror, then an altered horror showed in every face. The conclusion none of us dared to voice.

“I thought about it.” The mere consideration must have been torture. “I thought of—everything.” His face twisted. “And—I have no choice.”

I heard Callissa choke a cry. Amver was gray, Evis white. The image of Klyra's head, Thephor's remains, burnt before my eyes. But not the twins, I thought desperately. Not the twins as well!

Then bitter, helpless hatred blazed in me. Witch! I raged. Hell-hag, diabolical whore . . . she knew he could not have borne the murder of innocents, his followers' kin, blameless in every way. That he would sacrifice himself first. And us. Once again his own good, that should have been a shield, had been made a dagger inside his guard. With fists and teeth clenched I prayed, If I could just get my hands on her . . . oh, to the pits with this useless, crippling Math!

My eyes cleared. The acceptance of certain, horrible death was on every face. Sivar spoke for us, his voice just recognizable.

“Well, I—I'll go with you, sir—at least.”

Others murmured. Beryx stared. Then more excruciating realization woke. His voice shook worse than Sivar's.

“No . . . You don't understand. I mean—I can't go out.”

For a moment I doubted either my ears or my wits. All of us were speechless. He faced us, a man caught between his own integrities and being pulled apart.

“If I stay,” his voice shook almost uncontrollably, “she'll hunt out your families . . . farthest kin . . . friends . . . anyone so much as linked with you.” The sweat was standing on his face. “One by one . . . While we watch. . . .”

“Sir, can't you stop it?” Evis broke in wildly. “Fight her! Do something! Surely—”

“She has the Well,” Beryx said flatly. “I'm not strong enough.”

The silence yawned like a grave. We had seen the scope of his power, however leashed. For the first time I really understood Los Velandryxe' threat.

Wenver was stammering, “But s-sir, if we went back to Ph-Phaxia, if we didn't try to—”

Beryx's eyes blackened like smoke-stained glass.

“She planned it . . . while we were in Phaxia. I saw. . . .” He thrust a hand over his eyes. “She let me see. . . .” It was the barest whisper. “She'll go on with it . . . wherever we are.”

Beside me Callissa spoke up in a small, unsure, wholly well-wishing voice. “Fengthira . . . did you think to ask . . . ?”

Beryx's face clenched. “I can't see her. Or speak to her. I don't know if . . . Moriana's stopped me. Or—”

My blood ran cold. That the Well's malignity might reach so far as Hethria, affect Fengthira, who had been in my mind, an unexamined hope of reserves, superior force, was almost the worst of all. And for him, to find his own mainstay gone. . . .

He wiped his face. There was a shake in his hand. “But the worst is . . . if I . . . give myself up. She'd . . . she won't kill me.” He struggled to go on. “She'd corrupt me. The Well . . . I couldn't hold out. I'd—“ He actually gagged. “I'd become—Ammath.”

I understood. Death, torture, betrayal of us and our innocent kin, all would pale beside the threat of being not merely defeated, not merely enslaved, but perverted. Himself become the evil he feared and shunned and fought against with all his living might. There are worse destructions than to simply die.

He was flinching at some further horror, the most unbearable, because it was already familiar to him.

“She'd make me . . . the bane of Assharral. And I can't. I couldn't . . . not again!”

That broke us all. Evis blurted, “No, sir, you mustn't, love of—That would be the worst that could—” Amver, stiff-lipped, cut in, “If we gotta go, our people gotta go, all right—but not that!”

We had not eased him in the least. “You have no right to decide that—I have no right! To spill innocent blood—whatever the reason, it's Ammath! Whatever I do, it's Ammath!”

He had reduced us to his own helplessness. It was Callissa who went across to take his arm and say with frail control, “Then you have to take the lesser of the two. If some of us suffer . . . it's still better than—than the worst.”

He looked blindly down at her. “I thought of killing myself.” She turned white. “But that solves nothing. You're left in her hands—and Assharral as well.”

“You can't do that.” She spoke with fright's command. “You must think of something.” I caught my breath. With just such blind faith she had bidden me “think of something!” in the vault. “There has to be a way out. You'll have to find it, that's all. You must!”

Incredibly, that steadied him. After a time he stopped trembling. In a quieter if still hopeless voice he said, “I can only see one chance. And even that. . . . It's pure chance. Blind trust in Velandryxe. But . . . if I don't . . . give in. . . . No matter what she does. . . .” He shuddered again. “She'll go on trying—worse and worse. And perhaps . . . she'll try the one thing too much. Overreach herself. Break her own power. And do what I can't. Destroy Ammath.”

He looked at her without hope of understanding, and I thought how I had failed him at the same tactical crux. But whatever her sense of the theory, Callissa had a better grasp of the emotional point.

“Then that's what you must do.” She sounded quite matter-of-fact. Her lips trembled, but she mastered it. “No matter what happens—what it costs. At least there'll be a—hope.”

I saw him swallow. Then he set his teeth and took a long deep breath. His eyes looked past us, drained of power or vitality, but I knew he was mustering resources for the worst battle of his life.

* * * * *

It is hard to assemble a picture of that campaign. As in battle or nightmare or by Los Morryan, time grows distorted; memory jumbles under the impact of stress and distress, and, as in all crises, the past shrinks upon itself. I suppose we drank salgar, made and broke camp and traveled in Stirsselian, but like eating after a funeral, we took no note of it. Our real life was in the waiting, like citizens of a plague-stricken town, for the axe to fall on us.

Beryx's strategy was not all passive. In those first days he scattered our kin across Assharral, commanding them to flee if without certainty of escape, doing his very best to thwart the Lady's pursuit. “Neither of us,” he said, “can See everywhere at once. If I concentrate on anyone, she'll just raise more and more hunters till she smothers me. But she can't hunt a hundred packs as one. . . .” So he shifted his attention between fugitives, making this one zigzag, another double back, blinding or disturbing un-Commanded pursuers or guard-posts to help a third, bringing others to shelter or a horse. And abandoning them, with bitter anguish, when the Lady took command of the chase.

Sometimes he succeeded. When Karis' father sailed a dinghy out of Zyphryr Coryan we celebrated with more joy than I felt returning from Phaxia. When his cousin reached Stirsselian, Amver egged the Ulven on to raid a caissyn farm and concocted a brew that laid out the whole camp. When Evis' mother found the Sathellin we lit a bonfire and danced. To a Sky-lord the whole thing must have resembled a chessboard in the heat of a ferocious contest, each player striving to deceive, anticipate or wreck the other's assault. But this chessboard was a whole empire, with a hundred scenes of ploy and counter-ploy, and one player was determined not to damage the pieces, while the other was bent on savaging him regardless of cost. And the pawns were not wood or ivory, they were living, breathing flesh and blood.

Beryx actually said it to me once. “It's like Thor'stang. Aedric chess. Only she doesn't know how to read my mind or use a hidden Command or mesmerize me, and I can use all the arts. But she has the Well.” His face stiffened. “And we're playing with pieces of Math.”

* * * * *

The mere sustained relentless deployment of his arts would have been draining enough, even if, unlike the Lady, he did not care for the pawns. And of course he did. Every loss wounded him triply, for the dead, for the bereaved, and on his own account. It was a breach of faith. A culpable negligence. A failed responsibility.

At the beginning he asked us, with rare awkwardness, “Would you rather know—or not?” Feeling a pale echo of his own choice, we decided we would rather know, so he had the task of telling us atop the rest.

That is one of the clearest memories, printed deep by repetition and the crescendo of that helpless, expectant fear. A morning fire, among helmyns, in a heagar shadow, amid some eyot's scrub, baggage stacked on the bare earth that is the only sign of an Ulven camp. Callissa crouched over the boiling pot. The Ulven perimeter. And the faces, stiff, strained, trapped in idleness, even at times betraying the vile hope that this time it might be you, to have it over with.

Until Beryx emerges from his reconnaissance, haggard and white with more than simple defeat. Then that searing endless moment while he nerves himself to deliver the blow in one or another waiting face. And the hideous knowledge that however deeply you suffered, it was still not over. That it would not be over, until your whole family, down to the remotest marriage kin, had been wiped out.

He flatly refused to say what happened to them. From the nightmare look on Zem and Zam's faces I guessed they sometimes heard, and the Ulven must have shared it too. After the first really cruel reverse, when Wenver's brother and all his family were taken on the very march of Kemrestan, Beryx was crouched on a stump, more shattered than Wenver himself, when Ygg came over. He did not speak. He merely laid a hand on Beryx's shoulder and left it there.

After a moment Beryx looked up at him. He was silent too. Support was offered, and accepted, and gratitude returned, in an understanding that did not look for words.

The ordeal took a fearful physical toll. Weight melted off him, and he went off his food to compound the effect. Most of his time was devoted to the arts, but the breaks did little to revive him, for he could seldom sleep. If I roused from my own broken rest he would more often than not be pacing the camp, a silent, unseen focus of distress, and when he did sleep his nightmares were worse than mine.

That is another image driven deep by repetition and stress: Callissa's face over re-woken embers, thicker shadows of sleeping men in the outer dark. Beryx crouched over a cup beyond the fire, so the light exaggerates the jut of bones in his wasted face, images more dreadful than reality haunting his eyes. Sometimes they talk, the trivia of such moments. And sometimes a fire spurt catches the gray glint of Zem or Zam's wakeful, watchful gaze.

All this time she and I had been waiting for our own swords to fall. We knew we must be prime targets, yet the days passed, and still the blow delayed. Reason told me it was only a matter of time, or a refinement of the rack. Reason has little sway over what is neither mind nor flesh and blood. It follows its own senses, and is never ready for the smash.

The first warning was when Beryx did not return from his reconnaissance. The waiting, always a torment, became unbearable. We shifted and looked at each other, not daring to ask, What is it this time? Or is it he, himself? In the mind below thought, I think I already knew. When the Ulven began to wriggle and eye the sun, I went to search for him.