Land of the Burning Sands (39 page)

Gereint nudged his own horse up beside the other and asked in a hushed tone, “You mean to challenge… all this? Alone?”

“Not alone,” Beguchren murmured.

Gereint stared at him, incredulous. “You should have brought every mage in Casmantium with you. Some must remain. If not cold mages, at least ordinary earth mages.” He tried not to allow his voice to rise to a shout, but found he could not match Beguchren’s composure. “What does the Arobern think he’s about, sending you alone? If you need makers—if you need makers who can leap right through vocation and gift and power and remake themselves into mages to serve you, then you should have brought every maker in Breidechboden here! And you only brought me?”

Beguchren returned a calm gaze. “The Arobern wanted to give me an army. I persuaded him to give me a free hand, instead. Ordinary mages would not understand what they saw here: They would see”—he nodded toward the desert ahead of them—“
all this
, as you say, and they would lose all capacity for balanced thought. They would only wish to argue with me. Nor do I need every maker in Breidechboden—or if I do, then nothing will suffice. If I am right, I will in fact need only one maker.”

“You can’t… How can I possibly… What is it you intend to do?”

“Let us go back a little way.” Beguchren reined his horse away from the desert’s edge and toward a tumble of flat gray stones set amid a patch of tough, wiry-stemmed bindweed, its graceful heart-shaped leaves and perfumed white flowers as yet untroubled by the encroaching desert. Beguchren slid down from his horse and waded through the tangled vines to sit on one of the stones, gesturing to Gereint to join him. “Let it go,” he said, of Gereint’s bay gelding. “They won’t wander far.”

“Unless a griffin comes.”

“None will, today. Sit down. I’ll tell you a story.”

“Will you? About this past summer?” Gereint slipped his horse’s bit, twisted the reins around the pommel, and picked his way through the weeds to join Beguchren. His horse dropped its head, untroubled by the burning desert not a hundred feet away, and began nipping leaves off the bindweed.

“Yes. But my story begins earlier than that.” The white-haired mage tucked one foot up, laced his fingers around his knee, and watched the horses. His expression was closed and ironic; Gereint suspected that he was not seeing the horses or the bindweed or the stones or even, perhaps, the desert beyond. Beguchren said, his tone perfectly level, “This was my fault, you know. Or the fault of all the cold mages, if you like, but only I remain to take the blame for our mistake. That is only just. It was my mistake as much as anyone’s. How shall I put this? We saw an opportunity to use the king’s ambition to destroy the griffins once and for all, and we took it.”

Gereint didn’t think that he made any sound or movement, but the mage’s fine-boned face turned to him as though he had exclaimed aloud. Ice-pale eyes met his, remote as winter.

“We didn’t think of it in quite that way, of course,” said the mage. “The king was ambitious for a new conquest, and we, well, we longed to rid Casmantium of the threat of fire. Someone thought of a plan. I hardly know, now, whose idea it was, in the beginning. But I favored it as strongly as anyone.” He was silent for a moment.

Gereint did not speak; he hardly breathed.

“We thought we would drive the griffins out of their desert and across the mountains into Feierabiand,” Beguchren went on at last. “We thought we would send them before us, a storm of fire and wind, and that, coming behind them, we would find Feierabiand distracted and weakened. Then the king could have his new province—or if he failed of that ambition, we did not care. We thought we and the mages of Feierabiand would, in the end, join against any few remaining griffins and destroy them utterly. Then the country of earth would in time overwhelm the country of fire.” He paused again.

After a moment, when the mage did not continue, Gereint said quietly, “Everyone knows something went wrong. But I never heard anything but guesses as to exactly what happened.”

Beguchren’s mouth crooked; his smile held irony rather than humor. He said, “Nothing went wrong, at first. We came into the desert swiftly and quietly and came upon the griffins in the dark. We drew upon the long, slow memories of the sleeping earth. We smothered fire with the weight of earth and laid a killing cold down before us and around us, and they could not withstand us. In those first moments, we destroyed almost all of the griffin mages: all but one. Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin, greatest of the griffin mages. But even he could not hold against our concerted effort. The griffins fled west and south, just as we had intended, and we spun a net of frost across the sand behind them to hold their fire from rising again…

“It was not an effortless victory. We lost Leide. She had hair like a drift of snow, eyes black as a midwinter night, and a cold, clean power like the heart of winter. We lost Ambreigan, who was eldest of us all: He was too proud, and tried to stand alone against three griffin mages. But there were seven of us who lived to see the dawn, and likely it was a gentler dawn than that country had ever seen. Though we grieved, we counted our battle a victory and we declared our war as good as won.” He stopped.

This time Gereint did not prompt him. But after a moment, the mage went on, starkly. “Then the griffins found in Feierabiand a weapon none of us had expected. A human girl, a girl right on the edge of waking into her power as a mage. Kes, daughter of… some Feierabianden peasant, I suppose. We don’t know her birth, but it doesn’t matter. Sipiike Kairaithin found her and took her and poured fire into her. He corrupted the magecraft in her before it could wake.”

Gereint exclaimed, “He made her into a
griffin
?” and then, afraid Beguchren might stop, leaned back and pressed his lips together, trying to pretend he had not spoken.

But the mage barely seemed to have heard him. Though he glanced at Gereint, he did not really seem to see him. He spoke quietly, almost as though to himself: “He made a fire mage of her. He made a weapon of her. Or, not exactly a weapon. He made her into, not a sword, but a shield. He made her into something no griffin could be: a healer of fire. We did not realize at once what he had done. He made it impossible for men to do battle with griffins, for that girl would heal them as swiftly as they were struck down. We did not understand this quickly enough. By the time we discovered it, we had already lost everything. We were too confident.”

Beguchren meant himself and his fellows, Gereint realized: He meant the cold mages. He was not thinking of the Arobern or the ordinary soldiers at all. He spoke with a kind of calm desolation that was very hard to listen to.

“While soldiers battled, Sipiike Kairaithin hunted us down and killed us,” Beguchren said, still with that terrible calmness. “We did not understand quickly enough… and then we found the King of Feierabiand had made a terrible bargain with the griffins and allied his country with fire. And so we were defeated. And at first we”—now he meant himself and the Arobern, Gereint guessed—“at first we thought that was the end of it.” He bowed his head for a moment, then seemed to recollect himself out of memory. He turned back to Gereint, smiling his wry, imperturbable smile. Gereint found he had preferred it when he had not known what depths of loss and grief lay behind that smile.

“We expected a little political maneuvering, a temporary embarrassment, shall we say? But it is clear now that the griffins intend to force their way to a stronger, more decisive victory than we imagined. I think, now, that they intended this from the first.” The mage nodded toward the desert, where golden flames flickered across red sand and the fierce sun glared down out of a metallic sky. “We gave them Melentser and the surrounding country. The griffins said they did not desire vengeance, that they would be content to have Melentser as their indemnity. But they are treacherous creatures. We did not expect—how could we?—that the griffins would drive their desert so far east, or use their new foothold in our country to strike against Casmantium’s very life. It did not occur to us that they could, or perhaps it did not occur to us—even to me, though
I
, of us all, should have suspected it—that they would realize their own advantage and press it home.”

“So you came here,” Gereint said quietly. “You alone. Except for me.”

Beguchren moved his shoulders, not quite a shrug. “I would do anything to redeem our mistake.” He glanced up, meeting Gereint’s eyes. “I would certainly sacrifice one maker. One skilled, strongly gifted maker; the sort of maker who already has a thread of magecraft running unrecognized through his mind and soul and gift. That sort of maker might do for me what must be done.” He paused. Then he went on, deliberately, “It was not your mistake, Gereint. But I am compelled to ask you to help me repair it.”

Gereint met his eyes. “But you can’t force me to help you,” he said. It was not quite a question.

Beguchren bowed his head again. “If the
geas
, if any part of magecraft, could force you to answer my need, I would use it. As it happens, nothing I know can compel you to the… immolation and remaking of the self that is necessary.”

“Save voluntary self-abnegation.” Gereint tried to keep to the same deliberate tone, with how much success he could not tell.

Beguchren inclined his head. “Just so. But not today.” He rose, glanced once more across the hillside to the burning sands of the desert, and then stepped instead toward his horse.

Gereint also got to his feet, took one step across the mat of tangled flowers, and called after him, “Why not today?”

The mage stopped and swung around. For nearly the first time in Gereint’s experience, he seemed surprised. He began to speak, hesitated, and said at last, visibly choosing his words, “The, ah, appropriate circumstances are not yet properly arranged. I dare not act until I have done everything possible to ensure success. But hold to this image”—he nodded toward the desert, beautiful and terrible and utterly foreign to the country of men—“and when the day comes at last down to the hour, I hope you will ask that question again.”

The ride back to Eben Amnachudran’s house was very silent and not nearly long enough to suit Gereint, who would have liked a good deal more time to think through everything Beguchren had told him. They had seemed to Gereint to stay a long time looking at the desert, to sit a long time on the gray rocks. But the sun was still high above the western horizon when they came back through the orchard and into the courtyard. Here in the country of men, the sun seemed only a little too large and too fierce as it dropped slowly toward the western horizon. Clouds stretched in crimson bands across a deep azure sky; the tawny hills rolled out below, with the distant mountains a ruddy gold above. It was beautiful. But both hills and mountains should have been green with late summer, not tawny and gold with autumn.

Hostlers came to take the horses, darting anxious glances up at Beguchren and only slightly less anxious ones toward Gereint. He thought he recognized one of the men. But the hostler gave no sign that the recognition was mutual. He only gave a respectful little nod and wordlessly took the bay gelding away to the stables.

They found Eben Amnachudran in the room that was both his office and his wife’s music room; or Beguchren found him there. Gereint only followed, silent and self-effacing.

The spinet was the same, the floor harp, the racks of scrolls. But the books were all neatly put away on the shelves. Gereint recognized some of the ones Amnachudran had brought from his friend’s house, set now in their own places on those shelves; gold lettering embossed on rich brown cloth, or silver on red silk, or powdered opal on black leather: Maskeirien’s eclogues, Deigantich’s allegory about the white eagle and the black wolf, Hrelern’s four great epics, Fenesheiren’s
Analects
… They made Gereint think of the quiet days he’d spent cataloging philosophers’ theories of materials for Tehre in the Breidechboden townhouse. He wished, with a sense as of something long ago and now forever unobtainable, that he might someday finish that work and see what use she might make of it.

“A beautiful library,” Beguchren said to Eben Amnachudran, and with a slight shock Gereint recognized the faint wistfulness of his tone. The mage went to the shelves, touched one embossed leather binding and another. He turned to give Amnachudran a nod of wry self-deprecation. “One does not expect to find a collection of this quality outside the capital—or I had not. It’s a lesson for me. You must have gone to great trouble to build this collection.”

“Some of the choicest volumes I inherited after the loss of Melentser,” Amnachudran said. “Unfortunately.” He had risen respectfully to greet the lord mage, and now paused. Then he added, with a glance that took in the contents of the room, “Perhaps I had better send these south, lest some scholar inherit them from me a little sooner than I’d anticipated.” His glance, sharpening, returned to Beguchren. “Perhaps you might advise me in that regard, my lord.”

“The precaution might not go amiss,” Beguchren said softly. He lifted a hand toward a set of chairs near the desk. “You will have a day or two to do so, if you wish. Let us sit and discuss what we shall do.”

“You have instructions for me?” Amnachudran moved toward the chairs but waited for the mage to sit first. “I had hoped for that, but I did not know whether to expect it. If you have something useful for me to do, my lord mage, I would be delighted, I promise you.”

Beguchren took the largest and most luxurious of the chairs and then, to Gereint’s surprise, produced the purple-dyed token of a king’s agent. He turned this token over in his slim fingers. It multiplied in his hand, bone clicking softly against bone, one elaborately carved token becoming two, and then four, and then eight… The mage cast the handful of tokens across Amnachudran’s desk, where they rattled like dice: half came up with the Arobern spear-and-shield uppermost and the rest with the tree-and-falcon.