"
Here
we need not hide our abilities." The Rosemage eyed the canyon walls with a craftsman's look.
"The stronghold itself is large enough. . . ."
"For now. But it won't be. And we'll need tradeways: roads, passes, bridges. Look—" From her fixed stare, a line of light sprang to the nearest rockface a few spans away. A high screech ending in a
ping
, and burst of rockdust. A cylinder of stone wobbled, and fell out, leaving behind a clean, smooth, perfectly round hole. Luap stared at her, surprised once more. She reddened. "Of course,
you
could do more; I know that. And this tires me. But it will save our few numbers from spending all their time chipping stone."
It would that. Luap shivered, wondering if she were right in thinking he could do "more" when he had never imagined even so much. He shivered again, as the thought crossed his mind of what such use of power might say, to those with the ability to sense its use. As the smoke of a city could rise above it, reveal it, before its towers came in sight, could their magery make obvious their location?
"I wouldn't suggest it," the Rosemage went on, "if this were not empty land, unpeopled. The rockfolk never accepted human magic applied to stone; that was one of the quarrels the gnomes had with us." Luap had not known that; he wondered if she knew it as fact or legend. He wondered if the dwarven king he had seen would object; he wondered why he had been given no specific warning prohibition about that. The Rosemage continued. "If the rockfolk lived in these mountains, we would have to have their permission."
"What about elves?"
The Rosemage shrugged. "They would not care, why should they? They work their magery with living things, not lifeless stone."
"Gird told me once of the blackcloaks, who seem elves but are not."
"Legends." The Rosemage stared not quite through him, and he shrugged.
"Some are true."
"Yes, and some horses fly. No one will argue that Torre's magic horse did not fly, or that the gods could not turn mountains on their heads if they wished, but we never
see
a mountain balanced on its peak. Elves are strange enough without making them into two kinds of folk—"
She shook her head as he would have answered. "No—I have heard the tales, too. Bright elves that come by day, and dark elves that come by night, good elves living in trees and wicked ones living in holes of the ground and poisoning the roots of trees: children's tales. These people see duality everywhere, in everything, balancing a water hero against a sky hero, stone against tree: night and day, storm and calm. That alone shows it can't be true . . . it's too neat, a dance instead of war."
Luap drew a long breath, which tasted of nothing more dire than pine. The way Arranha had explained the original Aarean beliefs, the Rosemage's ancestors and his own had also believed in a duality, but one soon fragmented into a great arch of deities and powers, from the vicious to the benign. He had never really believed in any of them, until Gird. He was sure Gird had not lied about the dangerous being that had cursed him one dawn—Gird would not bother to make up something like that, assuming he had the imagination. But he had not seen it himself; Gird could have been mistaken. He had been, after all, only a peasant . . . he would not have known what it was, only what it told him. It might have lied, if it had been as evil as Gird thought. And he did not want the Rosemage's scorn.
"You have more knowledge, lady." Even as he said that, he wondered why his tongue chose
knowledge
over
wisdom
, which would have made the compliment stronger. He drew another long breath of air as clean and cold and empty of human scent as any he had ever taken. "An empty land . . . a fine refuge."
"Good morning!" That was Arranha, moving far more briskly than a man his age should, Luap always thought. Since Aris and Seri had healed him, Arranha might have been ten years younger. "A fine day. So, lady, you have the skill of stonework?"
The Rosemage smiled at him. "In a small way, Arranha." From her tone, she did not think it that small. He peered at the hole. Luap pointed out.
"Ahh. Fine work, indeed; you have a straight eye. But you've done it the hard way; we don't need that precision in moving large blocks. We're going to need to move a lot of stone; best use the quicker ways."
"Quicker ways?" She was rarely flustered, but she looked flustered now. Luap took a guilty pleasure in that.
"With your permission." Not that anyone would refuse Arranha permission
here
, whatever Gird's folk might have said. Luap smiled and nodded; the Rosemage waved her hand. "There, then," said Arranha, pointing out the opposing rockface, a little distance down canyon. "Block the flow there, and we'll have a sizeable terrace to work with, once we have soil for it."
Arranha's mild expression did not change; the rock buzzed, then screamed like some dire creature mortally wounded. A dark line scored it, visibly darker and deeper with every heartbeat. Finally light flashed out from it, as if someone had poured boiling oil into its wound, and a chunk of red stone the size of a cottage leaned out from the cliff and fell gracelessly into the gorge. When it struck, Luap felt the shock in his boots and knees; a cloud of dust rose above the noise and every bird in the canyon took to the air. He had no time to watch that cloud vanish in the morning wind; the old priest had begun carving another chunk, and as it fell another. By the time Arranha quit, the low end of the gorge had a pile of broken rock chockablock in its neck, and the little stream had already backed up into a muddy pond. The Rosemage stood silent, arms folded, her brows drawn together.
"There now," Arranha said, a little breathlessly. "Yes, you can learn, lady. So can he." With his thumb he indicated Luap.
Not all could. Luap found it easy, and the Rosemage difficult, but not more so than her finer carving. But some could not sense the stone's inner grain, and wore out their power on cuts that led nowhere, mere slits in the stone, while others could not score even a nail's path in the stone by magery. Aris, whose skill in healing no one matched, could do nothing with stone but carry the smaller chunks to be stacked somewhere.
Luap admitted to himself that he liked that. He, the king's bastard, had that power in full measure; he could carve his own castle, depending on his own abilities. Day after day he labored, never letting his growing excitement affect his concentration on the task. As Arranha had taught, he felt for the rock's own internal structure, the grain and interleaving of its substance, and concentrated his power so that it fell away as he wanted, and left sound walls behind. He learned to anticipate even the shattering that followed those falls, so that the very blocks fell readily to hand, for the builders to raise into terraces.
Others of his people had other magery; man-long blocks rose at their will, and eased into place. Sooner than he had expected, the framework in the small canyon had been done, and the lowest dam laid in the large one. The Rosemage had found a passable route to the lower lands southward, a matter of one low pass and a twisted canyon outlet where the little river ran knee deep from wall to wall. Next year they would smooth that route for horse travel. No one knew what lay beyond, but the Rosemage and Arranha both insisted some humans lived there.
As nights chilled, and frost starred the pools of still water at dawn, Luap felt well content. He had made a good beginning, it was going to work. They could not plant the next spring, but the one after that he was sure they'd have enough level land for some grain. Gird's successor had promised food for four growing seasons, he should make it with one to spare. His careful planning seemed to lock into place like the blocks of stone forming the terraces; he took comfort in the evidence that his leadership was working.
Deep under stone the blackrobed exiles had long exhausted their own powers. Nothing they could do from within would free them, and through the ages the land around their prison lay vacant—a tangle of narrow canyons surrounded by deserts. Above, the battle scars of their defeat weathered away in winter snow and spring rain; grass and sedge, bush and tree, grew once more free of blight, until the few wanderers who came that way had no reason to suspect what lay imprisoned in one red mass of stone more than another.
Then into their prison of ancient magery the younger, less-skilled power came, fraying the barriers as if a caress from without were stronger than the many curses flung from within. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the barriers withered. And silently, cloaked in that magery which even defeat could not wrest from them, the blackrobed spies went by night to search out their deliverers.
"Surely they have been warned," said their leader, when the first spy returned with his tale of mortal settlement. "Surely our noble cousins have told them—"
"No."
The spy smiled, a smile that should have been beautiful on such a face, but was not. "For pride the sinyi will not speak our name; they have tried to erase all memory of us in the old lands. And they resented this one's ability to use the ancient patterns. He angered them."
"Blessings on him." The tone conveyed a curse instead. "And what
did
they say, those guardians of our . . . virtue?"
"Only that a great danger lay mired in this wilderness, which he would regret awakening."
The flash of bared teeth among them passed for human; one of the others chuckled. "Oh, he will. He surely will."
"Not yet," said their leader. "Here we have leisure to purpose more than a hasty vengeance on our wardens. We can do much better, by Arranha's aid. Think on it . . . these mortals will settle and multiply, will they? Let them prosper. Let them plant their filthy trees, and reap many crops of fine grain, all the while fattening like oxen, like swine, for our feasting. Leave them without fear—for now. Let their prince, who is too wise to heed warnings he does not understand, take pride in his wisdom. May he rule long, I say, for his fall will be sweeter. We are free now; we can wait and watch this feast in preparation."
A murmur of delight, chilling in its intensity, followed his words.
"But there are hazards," the spy warned. "An old priest of Esea—of the Light, alas—has keen wits. And two of the younger mortals—one of them a true healer—have met our kind before. Or suppose their prince dies before the feast is spread. They might all leave."
Their leader laughed aloud. "You name hazards what I name treasures! The priest is old, you say: he will surely die before long. We are in no hurry. And they have a true healer, and a prince without the healing magery, a prince we would have live long in complacent prosperity . . . how fortunate for us. Here's a web to tangle those lightfoot cousins of ours, a jest to sour their hearts and silence even the forest-lord at the end. One shall snare the other, and never suspect it. Indeed the Tangier will be pleased."
"But we cannot approach the Winterhall: that magery they did not touch, and it still holds strong against us."
Their leader smiled, then looked at each face in turn, the companions of his long exile. "No matter. We have won, before ever battle be joined. Can you doubt that an unwary mortal, whatever human magery he may have, will fall to our enchantments? We need not enter the Winter-hall, when we hold its prince's heart."
Sunrise on Midwinter: Luap no longer shivered, having learned the bodily magery from Arranha. He stood, on the eastern end of the rock platform, looking southeast as rose light flushed the snow, as a high wing of cloud grew feathers of rose and gold, then bleached to whiteness as the sun flared, blinding. Behind him, the song rose up, the song he had vaguely remembered from earliest childhood, sung now by all his people. Not quite all, he corrected himself; all the ones
here
, the best of the workers of old magery. Deep voices, high voices, all in towering harmony that rang off the nearby cliffs, the echoes seeming answers from yet other choruses . . . his skin prickled. The words were nothing like the peasants' short rhymed Midwinter chants; he could feel the longer flowing lines twining around each other, statement and response, question and answer, full of power as the singers themselves. "Sunlord, earthlord, father of many harvests . . ." echoed back from the facing cliffs, and behind him the choir sang of "springing waters shining in the sun. . . ."
He alone did not sing; he had sung the invocation in the Hall below, at Arranha's direction, and now (also at Arranha's direction) he stood silent, looking at the land, listening to his people, being—according to Arranha—the tip of the spear the first light touched, the one through whom the Sunlord would enlighten his people.
"If you are clear," Arranha had also said, last night. "You must be clear, the crystal to gather the light and spread it abroad."
He would be that crystal, he thought, banishing from his mind the faint doubt he had heard in Arranha's voice. If Gird could become what he had become, if from peasant clay had come first that stone hammer to break the old lords' rule, and then that . . . whatever it was . . . that he had become at the end, surely he, Luap, could be that clear crystal point Arranha spoke of.
Light speared from the sun's rim, just clearing the distant mountain. He squinted only slightly.
Take it in,
Arranha had said.
Fear nothing light; the god cannot darken your sight; only you can darken the god's light.
Fine, but a lifetime's experience made squinting easy. Gird's voice, it seemed, came into his head with the thud of worn boots on hard-packed earth.
Easy? And who said leadership's easy, lad?
He forced his eyes wide, and felt that his head filled with brilliant light, radiance, glory. Slowly, the sun crawled upward; he watched, not thinking now, returning only praise for glory. At last its lower edge flicked free of the world's grip. Behind him, the singers fell silent. He stood motionless another long moment, then remembered his next duty. Arms wide, welcoming, he let his gaze fall to the little altar before him.
Light to light, fire to fire, sight to sight . . .
the peasant chant intruded, and he had to strain to remember what now he should say. "Lightbringer, firebringer . . ." His own power's fire given to the eight carefully laid sticks, no conceit of actual help to the Sunlord, Arranha had said, but willingness shown. And he must make that fire the hardest of the several ways he knew. A flame burst from the sticks, unsustained by them, unconsuming: his own power given freely. They would be saved to kindle the first fires after Midwinter Feast.