The New World (43 page)

“I’m sure.” The swordswoman smiled and joined him at the river wall. “What are you doing here?”

Dunos shrugged. Her voice had that mother tone to it, so he knew he had to answer. “Well, Master Tolo told me to find Master Dejote. I saw him here a couple of days ago. He’s not here. I decided to wait. And then there was the butterfly.”

“I didn’t see the butterfly, but I think it’s a good thing you’re exercising your arm. Does it feel better?”

The boy shrugged again. “I guess.” He brought his hand across his belly to the dagger at his right hip. “Easier to draw. My grip is tighter. We don’t have to tie the dagger into my hand anymore.”

“Well, we might still do that, just in case.” Ranai squatted down. “I remember you from the road, you know.”

“When you were going to rob me and my father and my grandfather?”

“Yes. You were the only one willing to step up to fight my companions and me.”

“And Master Tolo.”

“And Master Tolo.” Her eyes grew distant, as if the memory was years old, not months. “You remember he sent me south, to study at
Serrian
Istor?”

“Yes. And he sent me to
Serrian
Jatan with the robes of the man you’d killed.”

“True. The reason I ask is this. At
Serrian
Istor, I helped train boys just like you.”

Dunos’ face lit up. “You want to train with me? You’ve never wanted to before. We can do it right here. I’m good at Tiger and Dragon, you know.”

She held her hands up. “Slow down. Yes, I will train with you, but not just now.”

Dunos frowned. If she didn’t want to train with him right then and there, why mention it?

“Dunos, do you remember before the invaders came?”

He nodded. “Like when I found the glowing rock and it hurt my arm?”

“Yes, but not exactly.” Ranai went to a knee and rested her hands on his shoulders. That meant she was serious, so he had to listen. “Do you remember playing with friends and, you know, just having fun?”

She jerked her head in the direction of the Dragon Bridge. A half dozen ragged children capered and shrieked as Naleni Dragons made faces and roared at them. A couple of the boys started wrestling, and two of the girls whispered to each other.

“I remember.”

“Don’t you sometimes just want to go and have fun?”

Dunos’ eyes widened. “I have fun all the time. I really like killing
vhangxi
. It’s like cleaning fish, sort of, but they’re stinkier.”

“Dunos, killing is not supposed to be fun.”

Oh, this is going to be one of those talks
. “I know that, Mistress Ameryne. It’s not fun. It is satisfying.”

That didn’t wipe the concern from her face. This puzzled Dunos, because the word “satisfying” usually worked with adults. She wanted some other answer, but she wasn’t very good at telling him what it was. Most adults were. If he said the right things, they would go away happy.

“Dunos, when I was your age, I didn’t worry about fighting and killing. I had fun. Just like those kids over there.” Ranai studied his face. “You’ve been through a lot. Don’t you ever just want to have fun?”

He rested his hands on her shoulders so she had to listen. “Yes, I want to have fun. I remember the days before. Before the invaders, before I hurt my arm. I had fun. I ran around like them.” He smiled at the playing children. “I had lots of fun.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“But, Mistress, I also had work to do. I hauled water. I swept up. I cared for horses and mules and oxes.”

“Oxen, Dunos.”

“Oxen. I collected eggs from our chickens. I fed the hogs. I helped butcher one once. That wasn’t fun. I did lots of things to help my family. Some of those were fun. But I still had work, just like I do now.”

“But this is butchery, Dunos.”

“It’s work, Mistress, and it must be done. If we don’t do our work, no one can have any fun.”

A sharp cracking cut off any reply. Dunos spun. Even in the twilight there was no missing the puff of dust as mortar split on the Dragon Bridge. Soldiers hurried to where a piece of stone railing had shifted. More mortar crumbled and a piece fell into the river.

Ranai stood and peered over the river wall. She gasped.

Dunos leaped up and caught the edge with his good arm. His feet scrambled against the stone and he got his belly on top of the wall. He balanced there, staring down at the river.

Something was not right. His left arm itched, and that didn’t feel anything like tickling. “There are little waves everywhere.”

“There are. And there’s a tingle.
Xingna
, a trickle of it.”

He looked up at her. “What does it mean?”

“Faster water.” Her eyes slitted. “The river is narrowing.”

He slid back to the ground. “I’ll go find Master Tolo. There will be a lot of work for everyone now.”

Chapter 47

C
yron knew the answer the second the piece of paper touched his hand. “The rate of closure is constant, then. Eight feet an hour.”

Prince Eiran, who had slipped seamlessly into his role as Cyron’s deputy, nodded. “Prince Nelesquin gave the Empress a week. In nine days the river walls will touch. We’ll be fighting everywhere.”

Cyron closed his eyes. In three days, the largest ballistae and trebuchets would be able to shoot across the gap. In six days, archers could exchange arrows. In a week, warriors would be sword to sword. He could see it all, including the fires, the wounded, the dead.

He set the paper down and raked a hand through his hair, scratching where his scalp tingled. “This changes everything. Tonight, in darkness, have a work crew slip out and undercut the river’s north bank just west of the city. I want the river flooding the western approach. The increased flow means they won’t find a ford downstream. Send another team east. I want every bridge cut and every ferry on the north side of the river.”

A clerk blew on a sheet of rice paper, bowed, and hurried from the room.

“They’ll be building siege towers.” The image appeared in Cyron’s head. The towers would be solidly constructed, but out of material salvaged from the south. Beams from buildings, pieces of furniture, planking from floors or bits of wagons would be hammered together. At best, they’d have ramps that extended twenty-four feet, so the
kwajiin
could cross three hours before the river walls touched.

“I want the range from the river wall to each siege engine paced off exactly. Get Borosan Gryst to measure the distances with his
gyanrigot
. I want ranging shots taken so we know where those stones will land.”

Eiran frowned. “Wouldn’t barrels of oil be more effective? It would burn up the towers.”

“I don’t want to burn the rest of my city. We’re not using fire. We will, however, need sand to put out fires. We will need work crews—they can use the sand piles to block streets. We want to channel the
kwajiin
into killing areas. Count Derael has worked out how best we can trap them. Get his charts and coordinate placement of ballistae, spring engines, and barricades.”

Two clerks, one working logistics and the other on fire precautions, bowed and withdrew. As they passed through the doorway, a replacement for the first clerk appeared and dropped into place at a desk. As she did, heat poured through Cyron.

His vision faded, yet he continued to see. Each of the clerks became a bright spot, a
star
in the night sky of his vision. Little white lines connected them with others, creating three-dimensional constellations, with himself in the middle. Energy pulsed from him to them, and from them out to the others. Stars shifted. People rearranged themselves, resources were re-ordered, and what had begun as a tangled skein of lines and points resolved itself into a flexible and resilient matrix binding North Moriande together.

Cyron heard no sounds, but he knew he was speaking because energy pulsed out of him. Clerks rose and departed, sharing that energy with others. New clerks appeared and locked into place in the matrix. More orders were communicated and more people moved.

Because the pattern appeared so clearly, Cyron changed his orders. He reemphasized some things, or set up redundant systems. He found bottlenecks and alleviated them. He ordered water to be brought in smaller casks to combat stations. He demanded carts be requisitioned so meals could be brought to soldiers at their posts.

He reached out and the city seemed to fit him like a formal robe. There was so much there, but it all had to be perfect. He smoothed a wrinkle here, tightened a lace there, folded, and tucked. In the rush of things it took him a moment to realize he had his left arm back and was using it with the skill of a musician teasing notes from a
necyl
.

I am whole again
.

He laughed and his joy poured through the matrix. A prince born of princes, it was assumed his talent had been for governance. He had done well in his post, but the thing he did best was organizing. His father had begun the program of exploration, but Cyron had formalized it, set goals, and encouraged it even before he’d reached the throne.

I was a minister without a ministry, working at my talent without ever realizing it
.

He began to work faster. Clerks came, but before they had spoken or handed him a report, he knew their questions, had found solutions and communicated them. Some clerks looked at papers and found marginal notes they’d not seen before, then acted on them. Others suddenly remembered a fact he’d mentioned. Upon checking, they found a solution.

The matrix pulsed with life—his life—and energized him in return. The sheer joy of seeing things work, of watching them unfold and simplify, provided him with the same deep satisfaction as hearing a bird sing, or watching a sunset.

“Highness.”

Eiran’s voice reached him. Cyron blinked, and the world returned. The room had emptied of clerks and the day had passed into twilight. “Where is everyone?”

“They are off on the missions you gave them.” The Helosundian prince shook his head. “I was here for it all, but I never noticed time passing. I heard every word . . . ”

“You heard it? I was speaking?”

Eiran hesitated. “I
remember
hearing, but that is the only way I can understand what has happened. You did not stop and there was no problem for which you could not find a solution. Some so elegant that we would never have thought of them ourselves. Organizing militia by neighborhoods and using those neighborhoods as rallying points was brilliant.”

Cyron nodded. “That’s where they will run to when the line breaks. It was right.”

“The whole thing was right, Highness.” Eiran jerked his head to the south. “With your plan in place, and you in command, Nelesquin’s invasion is finished before it begins.”

Pravak Helos hated premonitions. He’d never been inclined to trust them back before the Turasynd expedition. Whenever he felt good about something, it always went wrong. And when he felt bad about it, it just went worse.

The only things worthy of trust were his skill with swords and his strength. He’d come to the study of
xingna
through his mastery of the sword, though he’d never devoted himself to it fully like some of the others. He’d learned minor magics—things to keep his blades sharp or to heal small cuts. But he’d refused to be seduced by magic, as others had, keeping himself grounded with his continued study of the sword.

The problem with premonitions was that they were irresistible. He’d come to awareness in midevening when something jolted him. It actually made him feel energized, which he took as a good sign. Then he decided it was a premonition. From there he had to follow his sense of things.

Well, his sense, and the stones.

There had been a dozen of them so far. Black pebbles—unremarkable save for their uniform smoothness. They reminded him of Nelesquin’s scrying stones, which Pravak had grown to hate more and more. They
generated
premonitions, and Nelesquin relied on them too heavily.

Pravak slid his swords into the harness on his back and set out. He found the first stone in the corridor outside his chamber in Quunkun, and the next in the road. He followed them as he would a trail, knowing that someone leaving so obvious a set of clues intended him to follow. That raised the spectre of an ambush, but this did not concern the
vanyesh
. A side from Nelesquin, Qiro, and perhaps Qiro’s grandson, he feared nothing in Moriande.

He sighed—or, rather, his shoulders slumped as if he were sighing. His lack of lungs had done nothing to strip away the habit. He had imagined Ciras Dejote would give him more of a fight, but the young man had not. If he truly was the reincarnation of Jogot Yirxan, the rebirth had been flawed. Now the swordsman was flawed—another useless enemy.

Pravak was aware that Virisken Soshir lurked beyond the river, but wasn’t concerned about him. The man was, after all, mortal. Though they had never seriously come to blows in the past, Pravak had seen him fight. While Soshir was good, he was hardly invincible.

The stones led Pravak across South Moriande and to Kojaikun. Here the
vanyesh
’s dread deepened, because he recognized what had awakened him. Many of the
vanyesh
harvested the magic from the city. The
thaumston
fibers he wore as a long queue dragged magic from the circles. Pravak’s new vitality meant he was drawing more power because no one else was harvesting it.

The others are dead
.

That shook him. The
vanyesh
had hardly been immortal. Down through the eons, survivors had changed—abandoning their physical forms for constructs they’d created in Tolwreen. Many of his comrades had ridiculed him for having his skeleton wrapped in a silver/
thaumston
alloy upon which magic formulae could be inscribed, but he’d outlived those who doubted him.

Even as he bent and picked up the final stone, he realized he was the last of those who had preserved Nelesquin’s legacy.

The Grand Hall in Kojaikun had been transformed into barracks for the
vanyesh
. Not only was it spacious enough, and pleasingly decorated, but the Keru had used it as a place to train. Magic lingered there, making it a welcome sanctuary.