Read The web of wizardry Online

Authors: Juanita Coulson

The web of wizardry (2 page)

"None can rival my arts! I am incomparable!"

His anger made them draw closer together, fearing a reprisal for such audacity. As his fury seemed to abate, they sought to mollify him. "We ... we only feared that we might be sore beset, once we are at a distance from your mighty enchantments, O Master Wizard. Then we will be beyond your protection."

He took pity upon them and actually laughed, a growUng, bestial sound that gave no encouragement. "But you will never be beyond my protection. I will accompany you, my generals, and guard you against the enemy's magics." He saw their mute wonder and dismay and laughed louder. "It is true they have wizards of their own. But they are frail, weak things. Like the Lands Across the Sea, they are much divided among themselves; they do not dance to the single, masterly command that the wizardry of Markuand must."

He leaned back in the gold-covered chair, more regal than his emperor could ever hope to be. "Markuand shall fall upon the poor fools like a storm. And if you need further assurances, my generals, be promised that not aU of the enemy's wizards are loyal. We shall be able to strike from without, and from within. The Lands Across the Sea will be ours, their people as midges, to be crushed as I strike my hands together thus!"

The loud clapping sound rang along the pillared hall. The master wizard did not deign to turn to the emperor, but that empty-headed beauty jerked upright on his throne. In a toneless voice he said, "So

I command it, my generals. It will be done. Markuand will have the Lands Across the Sea."

It was a pathetic aping of his late sire's imperial manner, but the warlords responded courteously, assenting. Seduced by lust for booty, chillingly aware of the dark powers ready to obey the wizards, they accepted this yoke.

"Within the season," the master repeated. One of his apprentices conjured a cup of wine, wafting it through the air to his lord's hand, that he might toast the coming victory. "We will begin, and bring all who abide there under the white mantle of Markuand, forever."

II

Nyald Zsed

In the chill darkness before dawn, the torches were sputtering. Danaer's breath came out in a frosty stream as he left the stone fortress and walked toward the palisades. The sentries at the gate were shivering, and Danaer noticed that they had propped their lances carelessly against the posts. He considered reprimanding them, then shrugged. It would be unfortunate, though, for those sleepy soldiers should Captain Yistar find them drowsing on duty. Danaer smiled wryly, remembering his own early experiences with the commandant.

On the drill field beyond the palisades a teamless caravan awaited its drivers and horses. Both carts and men were ghostly forms in the dim light, the soldiers' cloaks stirring in the rising breeze. Danaer wended his way through a clutter of baggage, now and then star-tUng one of the sentries into full wakefulness.

The fortress had been created in living rock, part of the southernmost ridge of the mountains of The

Interior. This was the last bastion between The Interior and the rolling expanse of the Vrastre Plains. Below, and to Danaer's left, stretching to the horizon, was the grassland. Nestled in the curve of foothills, weU sheltered by the fortress, lay Nyald town. Already the torches of both fortress and town were becoming lost in the growing brilliance of the sun's first rays. A golden wave touched the peak of the smoking mountain which loomed above the landscape.

The contrast of that sun-washed crest against the black shadows below would have given many men's eyes trouble. But Danaer's sight was unusually sharp. He walked without hesitation across the drill field and toward the corrals, vaulting the low stone fence. There a f amihar voice stopped him.

"La! Danaer!" Troop Leader Shaartre had been overseeing a detail and gathering teams and escort mounts for the caravan. Now the veteran rode apart from his soldiers and came to greet his comrade. "What do you here, youngling? I thought you were free of early watch this morn. You ought to be abed."

For a heartbeat, Danaer was tempted to speak the truth, but prudence held his tongue. He heard himself saying, "I have an errand."

Shaartre leaned forward in the saddle, taking a friendly, confidential tone. "Remember that the Captain has ordered muster for the first candle-mark."

"No fear. I will be back by then." UnwiQingly, Danaer recalled waking from a sound sleep, driven forth from his unit mates by a sumumons he dared not name, not even to Shaartre.

"They say it is a long journey to Siank, and you know Yistar's temper as well as I, youngling." Shaartre's kindly concern touched Danaer, and he was about to reply when the older man added, "Of course, the Captain would not refuse you the chance to bid farewell to your Destre friends in the Zsed ..."

"I have no friends in the Zsed." Danaer had spoken sharply, too curtly. Indeed, there was none of his tribesfolk he wished to see. Yet he must do this thing. To allay Shaartre's curiosity, he said, "Rest easy.

When Straedanfi calls muster, you will have the unit's full complement, including this scout."

Shaartre's broken-toothed grin flashed when Danaer referred to the commandant by that epithet. "Long-Fang he is! And Yistar will sink his fangs in you, youngling, if you keep him waiting. Well, then, about this errand of yours. But quickly now." He wheeled his mount and bellowed orders to the detail to rouse them from their laziness.

An ominous mood clung to Danaer despite that parting jest. Moving more quickly now, as if he could outrun the chill in his bones, he hurried down the pasture slope.

Only a few times in his life had he been so wakened, and each time the divine will had seized him, just as it did now. He must obey, though he be tense with apprehension and pious wonder.

The smoking mountain grumbled and the earth shifted slightly beneath him. Danaer did not break pace, reflexively compensating for the quaking sensation. He glanced up at the plume of vapor trailing from the peak and muttered a prayer. "Bind Bogotana fast in his deep realms of fire, Argan—goddess, grant it." After a few moments, the shaking stopped.

Now and then he slapped rumps or flipped the trailing hem of his narrow mantle to shoo horses from his path. He regarded these animals with mild contempt, for they were the army's preferred stock. These sturdy, sleek-coated black horses were prized by the people of The Interior. No doubt they were useful for pulling mine carts and plows. But in Danaer's judgment, the black was ill-suited for duty on the Vrastre Plains, the territory the soldiers of Fort Nyald must patrol.

At the far end of the pasture stood two quite different horses, and Danaer headed straight for them, chirruping and speaking the Destre tongue these animals knew best. These were his scout roans—shaggy, big-headed brutes his fellow soldiers scorned and called half wild.

Lulled by Danaer's voice, the skittish beasts permitted him to draw close, though the roans watched

him warily, their stubby Httle ears moving constantly and their eyes following his every step. Danaer grasped the larger horse's nose and slipped a leather loop over the lower jaw, then swung up onto the bare back. The roan bucked and reared, sending the other animals shying away. Danaer clung to his mount without difiBculty, and when the roan had vented the worst of its friskiness, it bore his weight without further complaint, obeying the guidance of his knees and the single-rein.

The sentries at the outer perimeter of the fort gave Danaer no more challenge than had those at the palisades or caravan. He had barely passed the gates before they lapsed back into dozing. These men, like all the others, took their duty lightly, and with reason. All serious threat of attack lay in the past. The Nyald Destre-Y who once raided this town and fortress were a broken people, their power crushed, perhaps never to be restored to former vigor.

Danaer soon turned aside onto a steep trail crawling along the face of the mountain. This path circled below the fortress rock, descending to the backwater of the town's river, the Bhid.

It was a watercourse originating high in the mountains of The Interior, amid snow and ice and fiery volcanoes. For countless generations the melt had fed rivulets and waterfalls and rushed down to slake the thirst of Nyald and the mighty Vrastre Plains beyond. Then, some twenty springs ago, that flow had ebbed. The horses of the Destre-Y and the motge herds which grazed the plains died of thirst, and then the Destre-Y themselves thirsted and starved, then: land becoming dust between their hands. When plague had struck, a weakened people were its easy prey.

Now the snows had returned and the Bhid ran full again with life-giving water. But the Vrastre was slow to recover from the drought.

Danaer's roan picked its way cautiously down the precipitous trail. Cliff-crawlers and bats returned from their nightly hunts chittered at him from the crevices amid the rocks. An ecar kit, busy robbing eggs from a mossy nest, hissed and spat as the horse's hooves

made pebbles rattle along the slope. As the roan reached the sparse copses at the base of the cliff and emerged onto the marshy flats, Danaer looked toward the sunrise and inhaled a fresh wind. Bitterness for the ruin of his people was an acrid taste on his tongue. Wind and water and game-had all returned too late.

With a sigh, he nudged the roan across the boggy backwater area. Here and there tiny fissures, birthings of the volcano, let boil through sulfurous smokes, a stench that mingled foully with the stagnant pools left by the river floods. It was not a good place to camp, but those who dwelt here had little choice. Nyald tribe must now be beggars at the feet of the army of The Interior.

Here was all that remained of Nyald Zsed. Zsed? Danaer winced to think that such a term could be applied to a ragged cluster of lean-tos and bony roans and hstless people. When he was a babe, this zsed had been a strong nomadic community, ever ranging across the face of the Vrastre grassland in pursuit of wild herds and rich caravans. Nyald Zsed had been the heart of a people famed as the scourge of the southern plains. Now only a few hunters were able to track the motge herds, doggedly following a weak Siirn. These people were too plague- and hunger-ravaged to accompany those few hunters on the quest and must camp here, waiting, existing on the army's charity, utterly dependent upon that soldiery which once had fled from Destre lances.

Grain was heaped at the edge of the Zsed, with a few torn sacks nearby branded with the fort's mark. Sad-eyed women and big-bellied children picked through the kernels, gathering their day's ration. They were too spiritless even to look up as Danaer passed them. But a warrior, dragging about on the stumps of his legs, let grain dribble through his hands and stared hard at the soldier. Captain Yistar permitted Danaer to wear his Destre mantle. He set his belt knife aslant, in Destre fashion, and the thongs of his tribesman's sling were hanging visibly near that sheath. But these few marks of his origins could not blot out the rest of his army garb.

He did not meet the crippled warrior's eyes. Soon the man's empty belly made him drop his glaring and return to pawing through the grain. The food had been Yistar's idea, a gift coaxed from the King's begrudging ministers. Yistar was no nobleman, but a townsman's son; and he knew the grim realities of survival on the Vrastre. He had convinced the ministers that food would buy continued peace on the southern frontier. It was a tactic that had worked well. Bit by bit, the pitiful remnants of a bandit horde had become like the fort's herds of blacks and woolbacks—property.

Try though he might, Danaer could not avoid seeing some of the misery and contrasted it against his own life in the fort, with pain. Why had he come here? What did the goddess demand of him? She had roused him with a dream and bade him return to the Zsed ere he left Nyald with his comrades in arms. Was there some penance he must make, some sacrifice to perform?

Noxious smoke, tinged with the fire-god's breath, curled about his roan's ears, making man and horse choke. Trees were bent and gnarled and leafless, and would remain so despite the warming of the season, for the fumes of the fissures had destroyed them. In this place of misery and reeking smoke, the Zsed seemed but little apart from tales of the realm below, prisoners of the fire-god himself, forever cursed.

At last the invisible goad which had driven him here made Danaer draw on the single-rein, stopping at one of the meanest of the tents. An old woman sat beside a fire, and another woman, not quite so elderly, sat a short pace away, watching the first. That crone by the fire raised her head and peered at Danaer, though her eyes were covered with a milky film that shut out the world. In a quavering voice she said, "Welcome, Danaer, kin of my sister's blood. Step down and attend me at my dying."

When last he had seen her, shortly before winter's storms had come, Danaer had not thought the old woman could live till spring. Now she was totally blind and appeared not to have stirred from this spot for days. Yet Keth at the portal of the gods had not

claimed her aged body, though she had known eighty full turns of the year's seasons.

Danaer threw a leg over the roan's withers and dropped to the muddy earth. He glanced at the woman to one side, his kinswoman's companion. She shook her head mutely, her expression morose.

"Welcome," the blind crone said once more.

"Osyta," he said with careful respect, "how did you know it was I?"

She smacked her lips, drooling senilely. Then she seemed to puzzle over his question, much disturbed. "I ... I do not know. Perhaps . . . ai! It is the will of Argan, kinsman. The goddess sent you to me." Her wrinkled features twisted into a tired smile. "It is her doing. I must die soon, and I would give you my blessing, you who are the last of my kindred. I must give it now, and Argan knows this, for she fathoms the way of all Azsed."

"Kant, prodra Argan," Danaer whispered, echoed by the second old woman. Again they looked at one another, awed. Truly Osyta spoke aright, for it was so that those on the threshold of death often were gifted by the goddess and would bequeath some special foretelling to their inheritors.

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