The Shadow Sorceress (45 page)

In the light cast by the lamps set in the middle of the conference table, Secca looked down at the lines scrawled on the single sheet of heavy brown paper, then at the stacks of brown paper piled around her.

“Dissonance…frigging dissonance…” Tiredly, she took the grease marker and lined through the words she had just written, as she had lined through others earlier. “Note values…not right. Again!”

She rubbed her forehead and then took a sip from the water goblet. She turned the sheet of heavy paper over and lifted the grease marker.

“Lady…why do you not write another spell melody?” asked Richina, as she refilled the goblet.

Secca pursed her lips tightly together. She could tell she was ready to lash out at Richina, and Richina didn't deserve it—not too much. She looked up at the younger sorceress for a long moment.

“I am most sorry…” As Richina backed away from Secca and the piles of brown paper, her hip struck the table. Water slopped from the pitcher.

“Richina,” Secca said slowly, “I will be asking the players to perform upon the deck of a ship that may be pitching. Fire arrows may be falling around them. Some may feel their stomachs lurching within them. Is that not so?”

“Ah…yes, Lady.”

“How well are they likely to play a spellsong they have practiced but for a few days?”

Richina's mouth opened, then closed.

“That is why I struggle with words and note values. That is why I call on dissonance. That is why…” Secca let the words die in her mouth.

“Yes, lady,” Richina said, as if she knew not what else to say.

“I must also worry about whether the Matriarch's plans will work, whether the spellsong I have yet to write will do what it must, and whether someone else in this dissonance-forsaken land will try yet again to kill me.”
And whether sorcery will lead to yet another spell-fire war where whole lands are again devastated
.

“Did not the Matriarch sequester all those Ladies of the Shadows?”

“Did we not have double guards the other night? Did Alcaren not have SouthWomen patrolling the grounds and the walls?” Secca took another swallow from the goblet.

“Yes, lady.”

“It is not your fault, Richina. It is not…” Secca set down the marker. “Perhaps I will think better in the morning.” She stood. “I must hope so…I must.” She bent down and blew out one of the lamps, wondering as she did whether the mixture of great and shadow sorcery she was attempting would be sufficient.

Yet…what other choices did she have? Her lips twisted in a bitter smile.

How many others had thought those same words over the generations? Had the ancient Matriarchs felt so…before they turned hilltops into shimmering black rocks and inundated villages with hot sands?

Cold droplets of water collect on the windows of the third floor of the Matriarch's residence, droplets not quite chill enough to freeze in the late winter night of Encora. Across the table where they share a late supper, long after their daughters have been tucked under their covers, Aetlen looks at his consort.

“How went matters with the sorceress?”

“She is strangely old and strangely young, as are all who would use the Harmonies.” Alya fingers the empty wine goblet.

“As are you.”

The Matriarch shakes her head. “It is not the same. A sorceress—or a sorcerer—cannot help but feel the sorrow and pain that accompanies sorcery. Yet, to do what she must, she cannot dwell too greatly on the consequences of each spell. Not as a young woman. Not if her mind is to remain whole.”

“Will she do what you feel necessary?”

“I do not know. I suggested she consider a spell to empty some ships of their crews and officers, but that sorcery verges on Darksong and will not carry far upon the waters.”

“Do we need the ships that badly?” asks Aetlen.

“We have lost close to a score since last summer. Need I tell you what that loss has done to us, to the Exchange?”

“No.” Aetlen's voice is dull. “Yet sorcery for survival is one matter, and sorcery for gain…”

“Trade is survival for Ranuak, dear one.” Alya's voice is al
most as flat as that of her consort. “Do you think I would suggest such were not matters nearing desperation?”

He nods slowly, then clears his throat before speaking. “There is one other matter. About the Ladies…the sorceress could not have known all those names, not even with Alcaren's assistance.”

Alya offers a twisted smile. “Of course not, but she handed me a list with eight out of the highest half-score, and the two most important, including Santhya.”

“You waited for the Ladies of the Shadows to act…just so that you could claim that you were not being hasty, and that you were protecting them?” He shakes his head. “What if they had not acted, but waited for you?”

“They did not. They could not wait, not after so many years. You must admit, dearest, that it was effective.” Alya takes a sip of the amber wine that is more bitter than she would prefer.

“Effective, but most risky,” he suggests. “What if the sorceress had not been able to kill Jesreya?”

“That was a risk, but it is unlikely that a sorceress unable to think facing an intruder would also be able to deal with the Sturinnese.”

“Dear one…she could have been a sound sleeper, and very alert when awake. Or unable to hold off Jesreya with a blade for long enough to cast a spell. You…we…were most fortunate that she is the kind who wakes quickly.”

“I know.” Alya sighs. “I was wrong there.”

“You were most fortunate. I would not risk such again. We need the sorceress if we are to avoid worse.”

“I will not. My few seers are watching all the time. So are the SouthWomen, and not just those under arms.”

Aetlen winces. “You will have a revolt here, just as is happening in Neserea, if you do not tread with great care.”

“I know that, also. Yet…what else can I do, matters being as they are? If aught else befalls the sorceress, we are lost.”

Two pair of eyes meet. Both are bleak and dark with worry.

The wind blew out of the south, gentle but chill. As Secca rode southward behind the squad of SouthWomen that served as a vanguard, she tightened the fastenings on her riding jacket, and pulled down the green felt hat more tightly. Already they had ridden more than a solid five deks southwest of the harbor along the west side of the channel, and Secca had seen no sign of the sheltered cove Alcaren had promised.

She watched the road and the gentle indentations of the coast, and tried not to shiver in the raw and wet wind under a hazy gray winter sky. While the day was colder than she would have preferred, she had little enough time before the Matriarch's orders for readying the handful of ships were conveyed to their captains and owners.

Every so often, she glanced sideways at Alcaren, but his eyes darted between the road ahead and the dark waters below. The road followed the curve of the time-worn low bluffs that formed the shoreline of the channel south of the harbor of Encora. The short space to her left between the road and the channel was mostly filled with water-smoothed boulders. To the right of the road was a line of low hills, sloping gently upward to rises which were no more than twenty yards above the water.

She felt foolish in some ways, accompanied as she was by two full companies of lancers and a full squad of the SouthWomen, but she could understand Alcaren's concerns, even with most of the leaders of the Ladies of the Shadows supposedly under guard in the White Tower—and their children in the Blue Tower. She twisted slightly in the saddle, looking briefly at Alcaren and wondering if she would ever have children when most
men looked either to bed her and leave her or consort her for her power and lands.

“You look fretful, lady,” offered Alcaren.

“I was thinking of the daughters and children in the Blue Tower.” Secca wasn't about to say exactly what she had been thinking, especially not to Alcaren. While he intrigued her and seemed to be more than politely interested, too much was hidden behind the pleasant demeanor and the polite manners.

“That is most necessary. Did Jesreya offer a word when she attacked you? Did she cry out when your sorcery killed her?”

“You
knew
who she was?”

Easing his mount slightly closer to the sorceress, Alcaren shook his head emphatically. “I never met her. She was once a lancer officer. I had heard her name in years past, and once, when I was guarding the Matriarch, a Lady of the Shadows called upon the Matriarch. The woman had the same long hair, and was of similar height, but I did not see her face clearly. It might have been Jesreya.”

Secca studied Alcaren's face, but the penetrating gray-blue eyes seemed to hide nothing. She wanted to shake her head. The Ranuan had been attentive, interesting, and appealing in a reserved fashion, yet…there was something more, and she was less than certain she wanted to know what it might be. Was that because she would have to trust him? She tried to push aside that question. “Do you think it might have been her?”

“I would judge so, but it would be but a guess.” He laughed. “The guards of the Matriarch do not question.”

“You are an overcaptain, but you have questioned me.”

“Suggested, my lady…never questioned.” Alcaren looked away abruptly for an instant, peering at the road ahead, before turning back. “We are almost there.”

Somehow…in his words themselves, or in the way they had been delivered, or in looking away, Alcaren had offered something, and Secca could sense it, but not name it, as if he had almost said more than he wished, and was uneasy about it.

Her lips tightening, Secca leaned forward in the saddle, her hand going back to brush the lutar case strapped behind her saddle, her eyes on the dark gray-blue water of the channel.

The road curved back southward. As the gray mare carried Secca around the curve, before her appeared a circular sheltered cove or small harborlike expanse of water, perhaps two deks across, and almost cut off from the channel by two ancient rock jetties, whose ends were less than a hundred yards apart. Rising out of the channel waters a half-dek eastward of the antiquated seawall was a long sand bar. Roughly ten yards below the road, gentle sandy beaches circled most of the cove, except where yet another jetty, barely visible because of the sand drifted up and around it, protruded from the westernmost edge of the shallow water.

Alcaren again eased his mount toward Secca's gray. “Will this do for what you essay?”

Secca continued riding, studying the waters and the shoreline, before she replied to the Ranuan, “Was this another result of the Spell-Fire Wars? It looks like it was once a harbor.”

“It was a harbor, although so far back that nothing remains save the seawalls and the jetty.” He smiled at her, warmly. “Several generations back, my mother said, traders from the Ostisles asked permission to dig a channel from here out to the main channel.” He shook his head. “It sanded up almost as fast as they could dig. I do not know if sorcery created it or changed it, only that it is a pleasant place to swim in the summer.”

“You have swum here?” She could not but help wonder with whom he had swum—if anyone.

“At times. It is a favored bathing place—in summer.” He laughed. “The water is too cold except then.”

“This should do.” Secca pushed away the thought of swimming.

“Good. It is the closest place to Encora that would come close to what you requested.” He gestured. “The road will carry us within fifty yards of the inner jetty.”

Once the column had reined up on the section of the road closest to the jetty and after Alcaren had sent out squads along the road a half-dek in each direction, the Ranuan looked to the sorceress. “Whenever you are ready, Lady Secca.”

Secca dismounted and handed the gray's reins to Easlon, still
mounted beside Mureyn. The two guards glanced at the road that led back to Encora.

“I would doubt we will be here more than a glass or so,” Secca said as she began to unstrap the lutar case.

“Yes, lady.” Easlon nodded.

Deciding to leave her hat on, and carrying the uncased lutar, Secca slowly walked halfway out the sand-covered rocks of jetty. Even after all the years of wind and water, the regularity and smooth finish of the dark stones suggested that the walls and jetty had been created by sorcery. After a single shudder as she thought about yet another evidence of ancient sorcery, she stopped walking and glanced toward the darker waters of the main channel to the east, before surveying the shallower gray and more placid waters of the ancient harbor.

Alcaren stood on the jetty a good ten yards closer to the road, his head moving slowly as he surveyed the channel beyond the ancient seawalls, the road that arced around the sanded-in harbor, and the lancer guards stationed there. His eyes brushed across Secca, lingering for a moment before resuming their searching pattern.

Secca squared her shoulders, then took a deep breath and began to tune the lutar. Finally, she lifted the lutar and began to play, running through the melody without the words, but concentrating on them in her mind. On the flat gray water, a cone of mist swirled for a moment, then vanished as Secca frowned, losing her concentration for a moment.

She forced her mind back to the spell and began to play the spell melody again from the beginning, ignoring the second mist funnel.

When she finished, she looked around, noting that Alcaren's eyes darted away from where the ephemeral mist funnel had appeared.

Finally, after taking a series of deep breaths, she looked to the channel and, holding the lutar but not playing it, began to sing the spell, softly and without any projection.

The light, hazy gray mist of the sky darkened into almost blackness, so dark that the day became dusk. From nowhere came a howling wind that ripped at Secca's riding jacket, at her hat, and at the lutar in her hands. Sand lifted from the jetty and the beaches blasted her clothing, and the back of her unprotected neck, each grain feeling like the bite of some insect.

Under the pressure of the winds she took several steps eastward, before she dug her boots in and caught her balance.

In the center of the sanded-in harbor, less than half a dek from Secca, rose a gray-black funnel. The waterspout towered nearly forty yards up, and the water level in the ancient harbor had dropped over a yard as the swirling mass of gray water swayed away from Secca and toward the seawalls and the main channel beyond.

Secca swallowed, and sang, if not quite raggedly, the special release couplet.

Sheets of rain cascaded around her for several moments, before she found herself buffeted by a last violent gust of cold wind. She looked down at the lutar, then pulled a strip of cloth from her belt—usually used for blotting her own forehead—and began to wipe off the lutar and blot away the water. She hoped she could get it dry enough before the water affected the strings too much. The half-soaked sorceress finally looked up to see Alcaren watching her intently, his face somber.

Then he grinned, shaking his head. His grin faded. “We need to get you back to Encora where you can dry out and get warm.”

Secca couldn't help returning his grin with a smile. “It does work…with just the song and no accompaniment.” Her own smile faded. “But we still have to get close enough so that it will strike enough of their ships.”

“That is the Matriarch's task, is it not?”

Secca nodded, repressing a shiver. The wind had not subsided to the gentle breeze it had been before the sorcery, and she could feel the chill as it gusted past the damp legs of her trousers.