Springwar (67 page)

W
hy had he done it?

Rrath had no idea.

All he knew was that it was done. There’d been the urge to watch, of course—innocently at first, but with a delicious thrill of the forbidden, for he did it unobserved from the secret passages Nyllol had shown him. And it
had
been forbidden, too: not the spying on the forges, so much; but the spying on Avall and Eight-cursed Eddyn, both of whom he’d seen casually enter the common hall, then depart for the locked workrooms nearby. Locked to bodies, anyway, but not to eyes that could see through concealed spy holes.

And so he’d found himself witnessing the creation of masterworks, which was a crime—
theft of inspiration
, it was called. As though he’d ever aspire to anything like those two young men could do! And curse Eddyn for that, too—to have caused so much pain to so many and still be the master he was. There ought to be a correlation between virtue and accomplishment.

Shouldn’t there?

Rrath paused in the secret corridor to rest, for that which he carried was heavy. How long had he had it, anyway? There was a gap in his memory that could easily embrace several hands.

And why did he have it now?

Once, when he’d been under the healers’ care, back in Priest-Hold, he’d awakened sufficiently to hear without being otherwise aware, and what he’d heard had lodged in his brain.
“If he survives—if he revives—there’s a good chance he’ll be mad. No one takes a blow like his and emerges unscathed.”
Perhaps part of him had taken that to heart. These were mad times, anyway, so maybe that meant they were times made for madmen. And so he’d begun to play the role in earnest, there in his hermits’ cave above the geens.

And then one day it had come to him, clearly, like a bell. Geens were the one thing in the whole world he knew more about than anyone else; they were therefore his means to power and prestige, and therefore the things he loved most. And with that realization had come another. Everything that was wrong in his life was due to those cursed gems. And—

That
was why he had this bag of secrets! Because of what they contained. What he’d do with them, he had no idea. Destroy them, perhaps? Or was that even possible?

What were Avall and Eddyn doing with them, anyway?

He’d seen them inserted in a certain shield and helm, but only after complex preparations. Which made no sense, unless, with battle imminent, they might be more than mere ornaments—perhaps even weapons. Why, they might even save the land! But in so doing, they would aggrandize one very undeserving man in particular at the expense of Priest-Clan and all they held dear.

By doing what he’d done, he was therefore serving his clan. More than that, he was making up in threes what he’d failed to deliver earlier.

Not only the gems—but the means by which they could be mastered.

Besides, if The Eight hadn’t wanted it this way, they wouldn’t have visited Eron with weather that allowed the regalia’s completion. Or put him where he could spy on Avall and Eddyn at exactly the right moment. Or let him know where the secret door to the armory was, through which he had lately passed.

On his way where?

The Ninth Face ought to have a sanctum here, but he didn’t know where it was, since he’d not been a member when Nyllol had shown him the route to the secret geen pens. Which was why he’d come here in the first place, he recalled, as he paused again to shift the bag he’d made of his cloak, in which sword, helm, and shield clinked and rattled together.

Maybe he should find out how they worked. Everyone else with whom he’d become entangled seemed to have experienced their glamour firsthand. Why not he, who had lost so much because of them?

It was rash and foolish, but Rrath was tired of being circumspect and wise. And so he trudged on to the first place he encountered where there was any light in that secret hall. Not a room so much as a widening of the corridor where another intersected. A tiny light slit in what must be an outside wall provided minimal illumination.

It was enough. He deposited the bag that held his burden and began to don the armor.

Which is when it occurred to him that he might
well
be going mad. Curiosity had driven him to follow Eddyn to the armory. But something else—a whole different part of himself, apparently—had wanted to get out there and fight the enemy. And since he had no armor himself, but was conveniently near a source of a very great deal …

He shook his head. It was as though he had two selves, one of whom was still the sly, fawning, scholarly old Rrath, the other this rash newcomer. Often as not, the two were at war. But the old Rrath was tired; the new Rrath, who thrived on impulse, passion, and energy, was in the ascendant. And while part of him knew that his actions were those of a desperate man—a man with nothing else to lose—he had no way to resist them.

And so, standing alone in the half-light of a hidden corridor, that in some odd way mirrored the way the controlling parts of him were hiding in his own mind, he began to don the stolen armor.

Mail hauberk. Greaves. Vambraces. But no gauntlets or coif because he wanted to feel the metal and leather that made the regalia special.

A breath, and he picked up the helm—and slowly, almost reverently, set it on his head. A moment of darkness followed, while he found his vision blocked, but then it took its seat, as invisible adjustment joints molded it to the shape of his skull. A click—and pain jabbed into his forehead …

And then he felt …
everything …

A sheet of white, a sheet of blue, and an irregular, waxing line of gold and black between them: That was what Lykkon saw. Snow beneath blue sky, with Ixti’s army moving steadily—if slowly—through the juncture of the two.

But he saw that only for an instant, as he marched with the rest of the Guard beneath the topmost portcullis, then down a hundred steps to the next wall down the slope—and through that the same distance to the next, where the King and the Guard and most of the archers would be stationed. A final wall girdled the bottom of the hill, its line of seamless stones sweeping away to east and west, with low towers rising above at intervals. Each wall was higher than the next one down: The lowest was four spans; the next, five; the highest, six. A long way to fall, or to climb. Lykkon tried not to look down as he found his place at the embrasure. His job, for the moment, was to watch, wait, and let Ixti pour out its lifeblood on the slopes below. He’d only enter the battle when the battle came to him. Or on the King’s command.

And so he stood there, nineteen and a half years old. Handsome, smart, quick. Clad in Argen maroon augmented by the embroidered crown in gold that marked the Royal Guard. His right hand held a sword Merryn and Avall had made for him a year back, one completing the blade, the other the hilt. His left rested on a shield he’d made himself, for he, too, was a smith.

A questing hand found a niche beside his knees, which contained a bow and arrows. Smart thinking that: weapons
made ready in the dark of night, that didn’t have to be carried. That the enemy might not see being stored.

And still Ixti’s army advanced.

Lykkon waited. Anxious. Feeling his stomach knot and twitch. He wished he hadn’t had so much cauf that morning, in spite of the hour. Cauf made him fidgety, and he was already too high-strung for his own good.

The wind shifted, coming more fully from the east. It stirred the light snow into glittering flurries that bit into Lykkon’s face like tiny arrows, though the air itself was warm. Most of the snow had been swept from the battlements on which he stood, but more was melting, running into rivulets that gathered in channels around his boots, making islands of the paving stones.

His gaze went everywhere, never resting long in any place. Ixti hadn’t made it far—the drifts were deeper on their side, and they were having trouble. Gynn had been wise to make them come to him. Snow was not the enemy’s element, and wading through it tired the troops. Why
had
they attacked so early?

Because the sun would turn this field to slush? Or for another reason? Second-guessing soldiers was not a game for which Lykkon had any aptitude.

Yet still he looked about. Seeking familiar faces—familiar heraldry, at any rate—among all those forces thronging the walls. Steel flashed down there, for the ramparts had grown a whole sharp crop of spears and swords and bows.

But where were the folks he knew?

Avall—he had no idea. He’d lost him after the fiasco in the armory. Last he’d heard, he was to have been stationed to the left flank, to inform the King of what transpired, with Rann as his second, since he’d lent his gem to the King. Strynn, newly arrived from the river, did the same thing to the right, with Merryn, whom he doubted liked that duty any more than before.

As for the troops … Gynn had spread them evenly, though he was saving the cavalry, posting them at the back
gate lest Barrax try a flanking maneuver across the eastern plain. Like the battle at South Gorge, Gynn had the mountains on his side to the west. Barrax might try to come through them. But if he did, he was a fool.

A rumble of cries reached him. Lykkon snapped back to attention, leaning into his embrasure, squinting into glare as sunlight flooded the snowfield. Metallic fire leapt from gold-washed helms among the foe as they continued to advance. They had come maybe an eighth of the way now, marching close together, shields raised against Eron’s deadly archers. The line of darkness between land and sky had widened.

Or the line of death.

Briefly—it might be the last chance he got—he closed his eyes, counted breaths, letting each one slide deeper into his lungs, holding it there, and exhaling slowly. Merryn had said to try not to think at all. Thought gave you doubts, and doubts would get you killed. Marginally calmer, he opened his eyes and shifted his grip on the sword.

The armies of Ixti had crossed a third of the valley.

No longer in a regular line, however; no longer like syrup pouring down a mountain of flavored ice.

Points were forming: one to the west, one straight ahead, and one to the east, where the ridge faded into the plain. The wall continued around there, as it circled most of the ridge, but it didn’t continue far. Whoever had built it had stopped construction on the northeast side, perhaps feeling that no enemy would get that far. Not that it was entirely without defense. A wooden palisade two spans high ran all the way back to Eron Gorge, and parts of the Gorge were fortified anyway—for many private holds rimmed the southern edge of its escarpment, not a few of which had at one time or other been walled, if not actually crenellated. But if the battle got there—Well, Lykkon didn’t want to think about that. Because by then there would be no battle, merely a house-to-house brawl.

Another eighth traversed.

Waiting …

Watching the black tide advance …

Waiting …

Hoping for gaps to appear in the flood still coming over the opposite ridge. Wondering how Barrax could put a square fourshot of men on the field.

Waiting …

Breathing …

Feeling his hands start to sweat …

As Barrax’s army began to move faster …

… pain jabbed into Rrath’s forehead, and fire followed hard in its wake: a rush of energy that galloped down his nerves like ice oxen on a rampage, that roared through him like spring melt that had burst a dam, that enflamed him like a river of liquid fire rolling down from the burning peaks of Angen’s Spine.

For a moment, he saw nothing. Not black, not white. Not the colors that lived behind shut lids; no sense of light at all, the way he could not see his ears or the back of his head. And then he saw
everything:
not only the gray of the wall beyond the helm, and the black shadows that lurked around it, but the grays
within
the grays, and the colors of the grains that made those grays, and the colors that made those colors. His head roared with the noise of that place of silence, where the only sound had been his own breathing, the rasp of fabric against fabric, and the scrape of metal against metal.

But now his blood thundered, and he could hear his skin stretch as he moved. He watched in fascination the slow motion of his hands—bare hands, on whose backs he could count the hairs, on whose nails he could see landscapes among the ridges, and on whose fingertips he could lose himself beyond recall if he dared ponder the mazes there—

… his hands. The right moved toward the sword, which glittered like frozen sunlight even in the gloom, with the jewel halfway down the hilt like fire crystallizing and melting and forming anew.

… and the left, to the shield, where the gem was set not in the boss upon the face, but in the grip.

And then both those gems touched the sensitive flesh of his palms, and he squeezed back and bore down.

Pain flicked into him, like scorpion stings. Right hand first, then left. Normal pain, but perceived abnormally, as though a spike the size of a tree was being driven into a palm the size of a battlefield. He could feel it slide in: an instant that lasted forever, roots of a tree joining earth and sky.

And then the power erupted again—rushing into him from both hands, rushing along his nerves and through his blood and his muscles and across his skin, so that every hair on his body prickled. And then somewhere behind his eyes, those three waves of—
magic
—collided.

His brain caught fire, and he watched with his inward eye, watched with dreadful fascination as armies small as dreams took form in his head and started marching. They assailed thoughts and built desires. They dragged out memories and examined them, and set them aside or discarded them. They found scruples and ignored them, wishes and made them strong. But they were not
him
. Not Rrath syn Garnill.

Not in any real sense. They were searching, he realized, for something they would never find, some indefinable spark of recognition called Gynn, whom they had come to help. Maybe, if they couldn’t find him, for another called Avall, or one called Merryn. Or Rann. Or Strynn.