Afternoon wore on to evening, cloudless and still. As the sun set, the sky took on a strange bronze-green color; everything seemed to glow from within in that uncanny light. No one had actually suggested that they might abandon their position, but Gird noticed too many sidelong looks, too many whispers. He wished he had even the ghost of an explanation to give them. Instead, he had an itch between his shoulder blades and the feeling that something very bad was going to happen when he least expected it.
Early in the night, he decided to pull back his people on the far side of the bridge, except for the scouts dispersed in the fields. He felt a little better then, but not much. He was bone-tired; he'd walked the lines all day, trying to see something that would explain what was going on. But he could not settle to sleep. Most of the others had, worn out with tension, but Gird stalked back and forth, in and out the gate, grumbling to himself.
He had just been to the jacks when he heard a resonant
pooot
that sounded like a novice hornplayer, followed by a shattering crash that resolved into a splash-edged roar. The ground trembled beneath him. Gird spun to see water erupting from the kitchen well, glittering in the starlight, higher and higher, a trembling column far higher than the tower. Cold mist washed over him, then a splatter of drops, then a flick of solid water falling. The ground bucked and groaned; he fell heavily. He saw the well split, as a cracked waterskin splits if squeezed. Water roared out of a cleft in the ground, waves of it now rolling toward him.
No one could have heard him, but no one needed to. That noise, and the shaking ground, had everyone awake and moving. But the guardpost's enclosed space was already knee-deep in water, water that surged and heaved, seeking a way out.
At least the main gate's open,
Gird thought, struggling to keep his feet in the racing water. He was soaked already, and the water was rising. Other struggling shapes in the darkness clung together; screams rose over the deep-bodied roar.
"The gates!" Gird yelled. "Get out the gates!" He didn't know if anyone could hear him, but it felt better to yell. He fought his way through the water, now thigh-deep, and lost his footing just as he came to the gates. The water threw him, tumbled him, dragged him toward the dry riverbed, but before he reached it was shallow enough for him to get back to his feet. He angled away from the river, shouting for his marshals. In the starlit, windless night, he could see only the vague shapes of guardpost, toll station, and bridge, dark moving blurs that might be his men, and the glittering surface of racing water.
Then the ground heaved again, and the guardpost disintegrated into individual blocks of stone and pieces of wood, as a final gout of water spurted even higher, and fell with an indescribable noise on the mess below. Gird's ears ached with the silence that followed; his yeomen's cries seemed thin, more like buzzing flies than human sounds. He was cold, cold all the way through, wet and shaking. He looked toward the distant city, and saw a faint glow move through the air toward it, to vanish behind its walls.
Anger followed fear so closely that he was still feeling the chill when he found himself bellowing at his people to be
quiet
and pay attention.
"What
was
that?" came a plaintive wail.
"Magic," Gird said firmly. "Now—who's where? Felis? Cob?"
Answers came, shakily at first, and then more firmly. Not everyone. Cob had been inside, sleeping in the guards' barracks; he hadn't answered. Gird shivered, remembering the way the guardpost walls had wavered. Anyone who hadn't made it out before they fell could be crushed—or drowned. Gird splashed through the water, only ankle-deep now, to the near end of the bridge. He looked down, unsurprised to see water in the river, rising water. Too late for the fish, but the frogs croaked happily. If I were the sier, Gird thought, I would attack while the enemy was still disorganized. How long did the sier expect him to be disorganized?
He got most of his wet, shivering, miserable yeomen back into some kind of order, weapons in hand. One watchfire, on the west side, had survived; he sent a hand of men across the River Road to search for dry fuel. With a makeshift torch in hand, he clambered into the jumbled mess of fallen stones and mud that had been a tidy guardpost. Orange light glistened on wet rock, gleamed on stretches of rippled mud, and turned the slow but steady flow over the lip of the kitchen well to a fiery glaze. Some of the odd shapes were bodies: a naked foot stuck out from under a stone, a dead face, mouth clogged with mud, screamed silently from its pool of water. Gird shuddered. Someone in the darkness coughed, then retched. Someone else groaned.
All through the rest of the night, they searched the wreckage for anyone alive. Most of those in the ruins of the guardhouse were dead or dying, crushed by fallen stones or drowned—or both, it was hard to tell. Daylight made visible to all what those with torches had seen in the night: an uneven pile of rubble, mud, and the smashed remains of whatever had been inside it. One by one they dragged the bodies out. Too many bodies. Gird raged inwardly at the unfairness of it. Felis, red hair thick with mud, crushed when the tower fell: he had been a burr in Gird's boot, from the first day, but he had also done his best. Cob was alive, but lame; a falling stone had smashed his foot. Gird looked at all the bodies, all the injured. Twenty-three dead, eleven injured who could not walk. Worse than any battle he'd fought so far. They would have to dig a grave—and for that matter, new jacks. They would need litters for the injured. Food—all the food stored in the guardhouse was gone. He was not sure whether to trust the water that still came from the shattered well, trickling away through the mess. It came to him suddenly that no one had blessed this well for a long time. Its
merin
might have deserted it, or been angry with the men who took its water and gave no thanks. Perhaps that had made it vulnerable to the magelord's magic.
He sent someone to find herbs for the dead, and flowers for the well. If any good spirit still lived in that water, he wanted it to be happy, to know that the men there now respected it. He laid the proper herbs on each of the dead, muttered prayers for their traveling souls, and scattered the flowers on the water. They swirled in an unseen current. Gird took that as a sign that the
merin
accepted his offering, and dared to taste the water. It was sweet.
"Do you know what it was?" asked Cob, when Gird paused beside him.
"Magic," Gird said. "The sier's magic, I'd guess."
"What can we do against it?"
Gird shrugged. He had no weapons against magic, nothing but Arranha's word, and the gnomes' word, that the magelords were losing these powers, that he could defeat them with ordinary soldiers.
"If that's what they used to be like," Cob said, "I'll quit cursing my grandfather's grandfather for giving in. No one could stand against that."
Gird cracked his knuckles. "I don't know. Most of us are alive, and he's not come out to fight us yet. Maybe it takes something out of 'em."
Cob spat. "He hasn't come out to fight because he doesn't need to. He can do this again and again—"
"If he could do it so easily, he would have before." Gird spoke slowly, feeling his way into the truth. "He sent his soldiers, his patrols, because that was easier, until we blocked the road that he needs. Besides, he hasn't followed it up. If he could, I think he would; he's not a stupid man."
"You know him so well." Cob rarely indulged in sarcasm; Gird thought it was the pain of his foot.
"I met him, last year," Gird said. Cob stared at him. "When I came to visit the barton—what I thought was their barton. It was a trap, but not for me alone."
"And you met the sier?"
Gird nodded. "Met him and—" He did not want to tell Cob all the details of that meeting. "He's—an interesting man," he finished lamely. Cob gave him a long look.
"It should make a good story sometime. If we live to hear it." He tried to shift his legs, and bit back a groan. "Last thing I needed—damn that rock!"
What bothered Gird most was not knowing what else the sier could do. If he could dry up a river and then send water out a well, breaking the ground around it, what could he do with fire? Could any one of Gird's cookfires turn into a huge inferno? Could the sier move hillsides the way he had moved water? Or call a whirlwind? If he could move water at such a distance, could he influence men directly, even kill? Twenty-three dead now—in minutes—at no risk to the sier or his army. He shook his head as if flies were after him; this would not do. He needed to know more.
Selamis, called back from the nonfighters, stared at the sodden ring of destruction in apparent shock.
"You're a lord's son," Gird began, Selamis's eyes came back to him, wary now. "I met one of their priests, who said they'd had great powers before, but now these were waning. He said one reason the magelords bred with our people was in hopes of getting more mages. Do you know anything about that?"
Selamis didn't answer for a long moment, his eyes roving across the mud and rubble. "I never saw anything like this," he said finally.
Gird grunted. "Did you ever see the lords use any magic?"
"Yes. My fa—they could make light. Some of them did, anyway. I saw one
call
someone once, I suppose you'd say. A quarrel among servants, almost a brawl, and when he came they all quieted, even smiled. Not like they were hiding the anger, like they didn't feel it."
"What did he do?" Gird had not missed the change in Selamis's tone when he spoke of servants.
"He gave his judgment, scolded one—but they didn't mind. They couldn't, with that feeling."
"You felt it too?"
"Partly. It was—" Selamis seemed to struggle for the right words, his hands waving a little. "It felt good," said finally. "Peaceful, like a hot afternoon. Safe."
"Mmm." Gird thought what that could mean for a commander. To have his soldiers feel safe, confident—he remembered that the brown man, the sier, had given him a feeling of confidence. He had thought he didn't want to kill the sier because of his own attitudes; had the sier been influencing him? And if he could do that, could he make others feel fear and confusion? He asked Selamis.
"I never saw anything like that," he said. Gird eyed him thoughtfully. Something about the man seemed odd. He was only ten years younger than Gird, but seemed younger than the other men his age; Gird kept wanting to call him "lad." Was that his magelord blood? Arranha had said the lords discarded their halfbreeds who had no magical talent: was that why Selamis had been fostered away?
"Did you ever do any magic?" he asked bluntly. Selamis's eyes widened, then narrowed.
"No." It was a flat no, inviting no more questions. Gird ignored that.
"That priest I met, he said bastards with magic were adopted in, and those without fostered away as small children. You talk as if you stayed with the lords longer—did they think you might have it?"
Selamis reddened, and turned away. "I have no magic. I am only a bastard, and my father sent me away—he never said why. I hadn't done anything wrong—"
But to be a bastard,
Gird thought,
without the talent they hoped to breed in you.
He didn't like the whine under Selamis's words. A few years of luxury too many; perhaps he thought he should have had it forever.
"What about fire? Could they make something burn, something far away?"
"Like this?" Selamis looked around. "I don't know. Light a fire, yes, by touching the wood, but I never saw anyone do it from a distance. Except—" His brow furrowed. "—the priests of Esea, in Esea's Hall, once. They said it was the god lighting the fire on the high altar, but I always thought it was the priests; they had that look, that concentration."
So Selamis had been to Esea's Hall—with his father? Gird did not ask; he had more immediate worries.
"Is there any effort to it? Does it tire them?"
Again a curious expression crossed Selamis's face, caution mixed with something else Gird could not interpret. "I think so. I remember hearing that."
"So if one man, say, did that with the water, then he might be too tired to do more today?"
"He might." Selamis pursed his lips. "They said it was like any other strength—a weak man would be exhausted from lifting what a strong man could carry easily. The man who did this might have been able to do more, or this might have been the work of more than one using all their strength."
Gird scrubbed at his face; he felt he had been awake forever. "And you could not say which, could you?"
"No." Selamis looked around again. "Did you lose the maps, in that?"
Gird had forgotten his maps and the records he had found in the guardpost. "I—must have." They would be crushed under the rocks, soaked and blurred, even if he could find them. He glared at the rubble. "Now what will I do—I can't draw maps!"
"I can," Selamis said. "My hands are almost healed—and I remember the maps well enough. Let me look; I might find something." He stepped carefully onto one of the tumbled stones.
"Go ahead," Gird said. He didn't think Selamis would find anything useful, but there was always a chance. Others had picked through the rubble salvaging what they could; though most of what they found was smashed beyond repair, some weapons survived intact.
Around midmorning, two of his scouts returned to say that at least sixty foot soldiers were on their way, carrying pikes. With them were a score of bowmen. Gird could just see the dustcloud. He had only a few bowmen worth the name, although his yeomen had been practicing with the bows taken at Overbridge. He had plenty of time to withdraw, but he did not want to withdraw. He still had almost twice as many yeomen as the reported force, and thirty of the good pikes. Unless the sier could make the river itself flood, they should be able to hold the bridge, at the least. He sent all his wounded west, to stay with the other noncombatants.
"You're sure about this?" Cob asked. Gird could feel the attention of others; he wished Cob had not asked.
"Sure enough," he said. "He wants it, or he wouldn't have done all that. We thought it was important before; now we know it is."