The Silver Lake (44 page)

Lying beside Brax, Spar jerked in his sleep as his dreams filled with smoke. His eyes began to sting. He couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. He found himself falling and threw out a hand to catch himself, but just before the panic awakened him, the tower’s voice rose up and he knew it had put the smoke into his head just to frighten him.

“Bastard!”
he spat.

The voice ignored him.
“The wall,”
it intoned.

Spar growled inarticulately back at it. Even since its ominous promise above the practice yard, the voice had been nagging at him, invading his dreams as well as his thoughts with insistent messages of misery and death delivered in such a smugly superior tone that it made him want to slap it. It was hard enough to ignore it in the daytime, but at night it was nearly impossible and it knew it.

“The wall,”
it repeated,
“will not hold.”

And suddenly his mind was filled with the image of tumbling stones. A choking fog of smoke and dust broiled out toward him and he stumbled back in fear. Then, as if from far away, Jaq, pressed tightly against his side, grumbled in his sleep, and Spar turned to drive his face into the dog’s neck, breathing in the heavy scent of earth and fur and ... manure.

The very commonality of the thought calmed him.

“It’s a just a buggerin’ dream,”
he told himself sternly. “It
isn’t real.”
Folding his arms, he planted his feet in the dream’s dust and regarded the pile of rubble with a deeply cynical sneer.

“The wall’s always held,”
he told the voice in a tone of cutting disdain.

“No, it hasn‘t,”
it replied, unimpressed by his bravado,
“and you know it.”

The image faded to become the rain-spattered cobblestones of Liman-Caddesi and Spar felt his heart begin to pound overloud in his chest as the faintest tracery of silver-white mist began to drift toward him.

“Stop it,”
he grated.

“Stop what?”
the voice asked in a curious tone that belied the underlying spark of triumph beneath the words.
“This is no vision of mine. This is a memory.”

And suddenly lightning skipped across the sky and Spar saw Drove, alive again, leap forward to jab his blade at Brax’s face. As the other boy fell back, he swept his own knife up, slicing through Drove’s jacket but missing the arm.

The slow, numbing panic that had taken hold of him that night came over Spar again as the memory played itself out. He found himself bending down, scrabbling in the sand for the rock he remembered throwing at Graize, who was even now running toward him, intent on stealing their one, their only chance of safety.

The rock’s jagged edges scraped against his palm as he let it fly. For a second he thought it might hit the other boy this time, but Graize only swayed out of the way and kept coming, but slower now as if he waded through deep water.

Spar looked down.

The mist had thickened, clinging to his feet and legs like strands of sticky sea grass. He kicked out at them, but for every strand that released its grip another took its place. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to see the savage teeth and claws that he knew were rising from their midst, but then the other boys were screaming and he opened his eyes.

Drove was struggling against a swarm of ghostly beings that tore frantically at his body, sucking up the blood that welled from a dozen wounds across his face and chest while Graize stared past him, frozen in terror. Brax was shouting at Spar to hide, but as he turned, Graize shook off his fear and, catching him by the collar, sent him spinning into the street toward a sea of blood-maddened creatures spewing out from between the buildings. Skidding on the slippery cobblestones, he tumbled into their midst.

The creatures leaped upon him at once, tearing at his hair and clothes, reaching flesh a second later. He heard himself scream, felt a blazing, numbing pain shoot through his mind, freezing his ability to sense the possibilities, and then Brax was wrapped about him, shielding him from their attack with his own body and, knife hand thrust into the air like a fiery brand, was shouting out the words that had saved their lives that night, the words that had summoned a God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The words seemed to explode all around them, blazoning across the night sky like a beacon. As the dream shattered under the force of Brax’s promise, Spar felt the voice flinch away from the brightness of it, and struggling to his feet, he began to laugh.

“That’s right!”
he crowed.
“Brax called Estavia and She came! He saved us!”

“What of it?”
the voice replied.
“The wall is breached. Next time it will fall, and everyone you know will die, including your precious Brax.”

Spar’s hands balled themselves into fists.
“No, he won‘t!”
he shouted.
“Brax’ll be Her Champion, the greatest ever since Kaptin Haldin, and he’ll keep your stupid wall from falling; you’ll see!”

The faintest outline of a figure cloaked in a spinning vortex of power suddenly towered over him.
“Oh, no, you don‘t,”
he said darkly,
“but you soon will. You’re nine years old
—
remember, Spar
—
you’re not five, but neither are you fifteen. You’re a child, a child who may not make it to adulthood without my help.”

Hands snaked out from the vortex, clamping around Spar’s head like a pair of iron bands. He fought against them, but then his head was splitting open like an egg, sights and sounds and smells spilling out faster than he could catch them. He saw Brax struggling against a hundred sharp-clawed creatures of power and need in a sea of blood-flecked mist. He saw the waves crash over him, saw them knock him off his feet, and saw the creatures closing over his head as he went down. And for one brief moment he saw himself standing on a battlement in the pouring rain, holding the future in his hands before Brax’s death washed over him again.

“I told you I would aid your sight and so I shall,”
the voice thundered at him as a howling wind rose up all around them.
“See! Incasa drew this vision from the very depths of prophecy, the God of Battle’s Champion overrun and vanquished! They know he will not stand!”

“That’s the past!”
Spar shouted, knowing even as he said it that it was the truth.
“I can feel it!”

“What of it?”
the voice scoffed.
“The vision wasn’t altered when Estavia took his oath, it was only delayed. The spirits drew strength from the unsworn on Havo’s Dance, and when they join forces with the Yuruk this season, the wall will topple. The riders of the wild lands will cut through all resistance like a scythe through a grain field and the spirits will flow after them. If they reach the shining waters of Gol-Beyaz, neither Gods nor Warriors, nor even gifted young Champions thrust all too unready into battle will be able to stop them. You know this; you can feel it, too.”

“So, what do you care?”
Spar demanded, eyes narrowed in the wind.

And from somewhere deep within his mind a field of flaming grain rose up all around him. He heard screaming and the sounds of battle and, as the fire raced toward him, driven by a thousand years of madness and hunger denied, he knew this was the future unless—he struggled to catch the one illusive image that refused to come to him—unless ...

“That’s right, little seer, reach for
it,” the voice urged.
“Unless what? Unless the Warriors of Estavia take the field? Unless Brax does? Do they need your great Champion so soon? And will he survive it if they do?”

Throwing his mind out like a fishing net, Spar jerked the answer from the fire and saw Brax, bloody but alive, rising from the smoke, his eyes the color of blood. The relief he felt was almost physical.

“And so he lives, then,”
the voice agreed.
“That’s very good. And it would seem that he also takes the field, but how? You told me that delinkon never do. What draws him into battle, Spar? And where will that battle take place?”

The fire refused to answer. Snarling in frustration, Spar gathered all his strength and threw his mind out once again only to have it slam against a rock-hard barrier that suddenly leaped up before him.

“What the crap is that?”
he shouted.

“The wall of power. The God of Prophecy’s trying to stop you. He believes that Brax will fail. He’s seen it and so he won’t help you. Or maybe He’s planned it all from the beginning: Cindar’s death, Drove‘s, Brax’s surrender to the will of the Gods. But the question is: will you surrender, too, little seer? Will
you
let His wall stand between you and your natural right to see the truth?”

And the fire rose up again, filling his mind with the screams of the dying. He saw Yashar fall, and then Kemal, saw a thousand creatures of power and need pour into Gol-Beyaz on a rolling tide of mist and death, and saw a figure mounted on a snow-white pony—a figure he almost knew—appear out of the smoke. He saw Brax throw himself forward to meet him, and then the wall slammed up once again. Balling his hands into fists, Spar hammered against its glittering surface.

“Break through it!”
the voice urged.

“I
can‘t!”

With a yell, Spar leaped into the air, fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase on the wall’s smooth surface. He hung there for a heartbeat, then fell back.

“Is this how you plied your trade in the city, little thief?”
the voice sneered.
“No wonder you let your abayos die.”

Spar lunged forward once again and suddenly his hands gripped stone and he was clambering upward, faster and faster, the memories of a hundred such ascents driving him on.

“Where will the battle be joined?”
the voice demanded.
“Reach the top, see the place, find the name!”

The open sky loomed just above his head. Throwing out one hand, he touched the top, and then the wall turned to mist beneath his feet. He cried out and the figure, now darkened to the color of heavy storm clouds, appeared above him.

“Climb!”
he insisted.

And suddenly he was hanging in midair, held up by the figure’s will alone as the wall collapsed around him. Far below he saw a tiny village appear out of the smoke and dust and just as suddenly he knew its name.

He fell. As the ground rushed up to claim him, he heard the voice again, its tone much gentler now.

“Well done, Delin. Now go to them and tell them, tell
him.
Yildiz-Koy will be the first but not the last to fall. They can stop it, Brax can stop it, but only if they know. Only if you tell them.”

And Spar smelled burning.

“Shield up, and then counter with the sword.”

In the practice yard, Spar crouched under a plane tree watching as Kemal flung his shield up to knock Yashar’s attack aside, then sweep his own weapon around to be caught in return. He frowned.

It had been two days since the voice had shown him the raid on Yildiz-Koy; two days since it had urged him to go to his new abayon and tell them what he’d seen. Since then, it had seemed content to lie quietly and wait for his response, but Spar didn’t fool himself into thinking it had gone.

Spar shook his head at the memory. Despite what the voice had said, he knew it had to have some kind of personal stake in all this or it wouldn’t have pushed him so hard. Nobody gave anything away for free, especially information. No, it would bide its time until the last possible moment and then, if he hadn’t moved yet, it would rise up again with a new form of attack. When it did, he had to be ready to meet it; he’d learned that much strategy at least.

But the question was, did he?

“A shield is best used to deflect, not to block,” Kemal continued, breaking into his reverie. “Never take a blow directly if you can help it. The shield may not be able to withstand the force of it and, if it breaks, your arm certainly won’t withstand another. A broken shield is preferable to a broken arm, but an intact shield and an intact arm are the most preferable of all.”