The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle (46 page)

Anna brushed more dust off her sleeves. The main road had gotten narrower, and even dustier. The trees had gotten shorter, with more low evergreens and less broadleafs, and consequently less shade.

“. . . wish she’d find a better way . . .”

“. . . we took three keeps now . . . lost maybe a score . . . wager ‘gainst that if you want . . . eat dust all summer. . . .”

“. . . can’t breathe . . .”

Red dust, and more sandy red dust, swirled up from the main body. Anna pushed back the battered brown felt hat and blotted her sweating forehead. The gray square of cloth was once again a muddy red.

Beside her, Jecks rode silently, his silver hair marked with blotches of red where sweat and dust had combined.

“A penny . . . a copper,” she corrected, “for your thoughts.” She shifted her weight in a saddle that had gotten progressively harder and less comfortable.

“You would have us travel a long way to avoid killing Dencer. Yet you dislike the man.” Jecks’ words were slow, thoughtful.

“I don’t have any problem with killing Dencer, necessarily,” she answered. “I don’t want to turn another keep into something like Suhl.” Anna shrugged. “We can’t get close enough to Stromwer to use sorcery—the kind that won’t kill everyone—unless we do this.”

Jecks nodded, the kind of nod that told Anna he wasn’t quite sure he believed her.

Did she believe herself—or was she overreacting to the disaster at Suhl?
How much force is necessary in a place like Defalk? Is Jecks right? Would I be better off doing it the simpler way? Can I at least cast one more loyalty spell . . . to spare Defalk
.

The sorceress took a deep breath.
Or is this to ease your conscience?
She winced at the thought.

As Farinelli carried Anna to the top of a low ridge, momentarily out of the dust, she could see the winding strip of green in the narrow valley ahead,
green
that showed the promised stream. On the other side of the stream, the trail wound back eastward, toward Stromwer.

Toward another set of gambles with spells, another effort to resolve violent feelings with as few deaths as possible.
And for what? So you can ensure a marginally-grateful twelve-year-old will inherit what his father wasn’t strong enough to keep? So that you can’t move without guards following every motion? So that everything you do is questioned?

Anna pushed away the thoughts and leaned forward to give Farinelli a solid thump on the neck. “We’re getting there, fellow. It won’t be long.”

A
nna packed away the glass and strapped the leather bundle to the saddlebags once again. Then she remounted Farinelli, swaying slightly as she swung into the saddle.

“You must eat.” Jecks eased his mount beside hers and extended a chunk of bread.

“Thank you.” Anna nodded, took a bite of the bread, and chewed. “Another dek, I’d guess.” She pointed.
“About halfway up that next section. By the clump of pines there.”

“Junipers,” Jecks corrected.

“Junipers, whatever.” She chewed another mouthful. Why didn’t he understand that she
hated
being corrected over little things. What difference did it make whether it was a pine or a juniper? She’d just pointed out a clump of trees as a reference point.

Were men everywhere like that? Avery had been worse, she had to admit, correcting
everything
. Then, he’d been king of the comprimarios, able to get any secondary role anywhere, but never the big roles.

Anna laughed to herself. She had the biggest role ever—sorceress and regent—and, fortunately and unfortunately, it was for real. She unstoppered the water bottle, her third for the day, and took another long swallow.

The dust puffed from under the horses’ hoofs. The wind raised it around them and coated them all with fine red powder. Anna took another swallow of water and finished the bread. Without speaking, Jecks extended another chunk.

“Thank you.” Anna took it. She was being bitchy, in a way, but he wasn’t the one who had to stand out there and wonder if the spell would be right, if fire would turn and kill them all or whatever. Or if she would fail. Sorcerers did fail. She’d seen Brill die from failing, and she’d overmastered the Evult. Who was to say that another sorcerer wouldn’t show up with greater power?

Like the Sea-Priest or the young man in brown with hate in his eyes. She’d tried to find out more from the glass, but all she could see was that he lived in a small town and worked in some sort of store, a chandlery, it looked like in the silver-mist visions.

Without thinking, Anna discovered she had eaten all the bread.

“You were hungry,” Jecks observed, as if that explained everything.

“Thank you. I was.” Anna let him think that she had
only been hungry. She wasn’t in the mood for explaining, and now wasn’t the time. Instead, she studied the steep hillside to her left as Farinelli carried her closer to the pines—the junipers, she reminded herself—on the downhill side of the trail. Beyond the dry gorge to her right, the hills climbed into even higher peaks, with barren but not snow-covered summits, mountains almost like plateaus tilted slightly sideways.

Opposite the junipers, Anna reined up, then dismounted and handed Farinelli’s reins to Rickel. She took out the glass, and unwrapped it again. Then she took out the lutar and retuned it, not that it needed much work in traveling less than a dek.

Words drifted uphill as she touched a tuning peg.

“. . . hope we’re wherever we’re going. . . .”

“Don’t hope too much. You might have to fight, then.”

. . . avoids fights when she can . . .”

“. . . lucky we are, there . . . not like Barjim or Donjim. . . .”

Then, reflected Anna, clearing her throat for a vocalise, Barjim and Donjim hadn’t been able to call on sorcery. Would her voice last? She pushed that thought back as well.
Not the time for that. . . .

Finally, her fingers touched the strings.

“Show me now and show me clear,
where I stand to make a tunnel near . . .”

In the glass, Anna stood perhaps a yard uphill of where the glass lay on the dust of the trail. The image in the mirror was crystal-clear, and the spell took nearly no energy at all, a confirmation of her closeness.

After quickly clearing the image from the mirror, the sorceress glanced at Hanfor and Jecks. “This is the place.” She almost laughed, thinking of someone else’s words in another canyon a world away and years past.
Careful . . . don’t get punchy. You haven’t even started. Worry? Fear?

She turned and looked for Liende. “Chief player?”

“We are coming, Regent.”

As the players gathered and began to tune, Hanfor called orders in the background.

“Alvar, take the purple company up to the crest. Jirsit, the greens back to the last hilltop there. Scouts. . . .”

“The building spell?” asked Liende.

“The second one,” Anna confirmed.

“After that? Do you know?”

“The loyalty spell . . . if it goes well. If not,” Anna winced, “the flame spell.”

“Let us pray to harmony it goes well,” Liende murmured.

It won’t . . .
Anna pushed that thought back as well and cleared her throat, bending to retrieve the mirror. First, she packed away the lutar. Then came the traveling mirror. The sorceress noted that the frame was so black it was almost polished like hard coal. How long would this one last? Like singing, sorcery was hard on everyone and everything involved.

Jecks had dismounted and stepped closer to Anna, leading his horse. “So far . . . there’s no sign of Dencer’s folk.”

“That’s fine with me.” Anna glanced at the wall of red-and-gray rock layers. Red and gray? That seemed odd to her, but it had been twenty years since freshman geology.

She looked up. Above and before her, the rocks climbed several yards more. To either side they towered even farther. The mountains had been Stromwer’s protection for years.

“I like it not, not seeing your enemy.” Jecks chuckled. “Like as not, we’ll see them soon as your tunnel appears west of the keep.”

“It won’t be over the keep. It’s still almost a dek from the overlook I’m trying to create to the keep walls. That’s as close as we can get.”

“Is that close enough?”

“It will have to be.” Anna offered a cold smile. “If it’s not . . . well, I can always resort to turning everything into molten rock.” She bit off the next words, the ones like, . . .
and what would that do for the sensibilities of your northern lords?
“I hope I don’t have to do that.”

“Nor I.”

Anna stepped away and started a vocalise . . . softly. She didn’t want to strain her cords. She had no idea how many spells she might need on the other side of the tunnel—assuming she could create a tunnel, assuming it didn’t collapse, assuming . . . The sorceress forced her mind onto the vocalise, onto the exercise itself, shutting out everything.

A second vocalise followed the first.

“Lady Anna?” Liende’s voice broke through the sudden comparative quiet, where the only sounds were those of horses and the murmurs of the one company Hanfor had pulled back from where Anna and Jecks and the players stood. Even Fhurgen and Rickel had moved their mounts back, and Anna’s and Jecks’ as well. “Lady Anna, we are ready when you are.”

The sorceress and regent nodded.

“The second building song!” Liende gestured.

Anna took a deep breath.
Are you crazy? Trying to use sorcery to drill a tunnel through a mountain? But it’s not a mountain, just a short chunk of rock, and that’s not as bad as calling up lava from underground. . . .
She cut off the mental dialogue and hummed, trying to get her pitch. Then she began the spell.

“. . . remove all boulders, clay and stones.
Fix the braces in their proper zones . . .
Drill the tunnel straight and true and square;
form this hill to my pattern there . . .

“Smooth the rock and make it hard . . .”

The problem with spells wasn’t just the words in rhyme but making sure that the word matched the note values as
well, and sometimes—too many times, it seemed—she was shading notes or note values or words, or all three.
Just so long as it’s musical. . . .

The ground shivered. The unseen chime, or chimes, or chords that no one seemed to sense but Anna, rang across the skies, for a moment, turning the entire heaven bright blue, before the scattered and puffy clouds reappeared.

Dust, and a gout of hot air geysered from the rock in front of Anna, and she backed up, squinting, then closing her eyes. There was the patter of rain, except it was tiny fragments of rock.

As the haze settled, Anna opened her eyes back to a squint, peering through the semicircle that arrowed into the improbable gray-and-red rock. At the other end was a semicircle of light, light that seemed to cascade and flare around her.

She staggered and sat down.

Jecks knelt beside her, offering bread and hard yellow cheese. “You need to eat.”

“Have to hurry. . . .” she muttered.

“You cannot move until you eat.”

“Drink?” she asked.

He also had her water bottle, and she took a long swallow, then a mouthful of bread, then one of cheese, and then more water. The pulsating glare receded.

“Not too bad.” Anna looked at the tunnel. “I still worry.”

“Keep eating,” said Jecks. “If your spell is as you planned, what can Dencer do? If it isn’t, you’ll have to be strong.”

She drank more of the water, and then finished the bread, before she looked back. Behind her the players sat on the rocks and the trail itself and followed her example.

When she had finished, Anna slowly stood and stretched.

Liende walked slowly toward the sorceress. “How many more spells?”

“I hope one—the loyalty spell. Otherwise, the long
flame spell. I’m going to see.” Anna started toward the tunnel.

Jecks took two quick steps to join her. Both Fhurgen and Rickel hurriedly dismounted, handing off their equine charges to other guards, and scurried after Anna, shields on their arms.

Anna took one step after another, the way getting dimmer as she walked. The floor felt warm, almost uncomfortably so, but a breeze blew from the eastern end. Anna kept walking, but the semicircle of light at the other end grew but slowly.

Her nose began to itch, and she sneezed, abruptly, three times in a row. Sweat dripped down the back of her shirt.

“Hot as dissonance here,” murmured someone—Rickel or one of the guards who trailed them.

At last, she peered out of the tunnel onto the ledge—and the sunlight. Her eyes watered. At the end was a low wall, waist-high.
Did I put that in?
She almost wanted to laugh. She hadn’t remembered visualizing a safety wall, but her fear of heights had definitely kicked in.

With a swallow, Anna stepped in the sunlight.

“A moment, lady,” said Fhurgen.

Fhurgen and Rickel, bearing the shields they used to protect her, stepped out onto the ledge.

Anna followed them, with Jecks beside her, out to the wall. She forced herself to look down at the valley beyond. The tunnel and ledge were more than a hundred yards above the valley floor. With another swallow, she surveyed Stromwer.

Less than a hundred yards to the east, and a hundred yards below, lines of archers were forming up, still ragged, but the bows were obvious—both for the larger group in tan and the smaller group in crimson. So were the four crossbowmen to their left. Behind them, were over twoscore mounted figures, most in crimson—the Dumarans. Behind the archers was an angular figure waving a blade and shouting commands.

“Best you hurry,” Jecks suggested. “Their shafts could reach the ledge.”

“They can lift arrows that far?”

As if to answer her question, an arrow arched over the wall and clattered on the stone.

Rickel and Fhurgen lifted the shields, and Anna turned and called down the tunnel. “Players!”

“Players!” Jecks’ heavier voice boomed against the stones.

Anna dropped to her knees, letting the wall shield her, and took another look at the armsmen below. Two blocks of archers—one in tan, one in crimson—were loosing shafts rapidly. Was the tall figure on horseback beside the archers in tan Dencer himself? The Lord of Stromwer had to have had some warning, some scrying ability, to have gotten his men formed up so quickly. Anna could see Dencer had sheathed his blade and was drawing a bow from horseback. She ducked behind the shield.