Dark is the Moon

by Ian Irvine

  Dilman cleared his throat behind her. “Time to go, lar!”

  Yes, time had run out and she knew nothing more than she had the previous day. She went back down to the camp, where her soldiers were already marching in, and the smart salutes of her troops, the whispers behind her back about her strange powers, the boasts of a quick victory tomorrow, were gall in her mouth. She was a facade, an empty shell that the Ghâshâd would blow apart, and these poor fools would die for it.

  Maigraith spent all afternoon and evening trying to design a glamour that would conceal the front ranks of her troops so that they could reach the gates undetected. She had considered every form of the Secret Art that she had any capacity for. Illusion had been her first thought—literally painting pictures in the air to conceal the marching troops. It was probably her best chance, and the darkness would help even though there was a bright moon. But an illusion to conceal an army, from so many of the enemy, would probably be beyond her.

  Mesmerism and forms of mass hypnosis she quickly rejected. Such things could not be done from a distance, and in any case Maigraith was not confident that she had the ability. Her lack of empathy with other people was a fatal handicap.

  Another option was physical concealment, such as by bringing down fog or mist. But to create mist on a hot summer’s night in this drought-stricken land would be difficult. “Where’s the nearest water?” she whispered to Dilman after midnight.

  “Half a league away, just by their camp.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  “No, lar, I can’t. They’ve got scouts all along the river. Is it important?”

  “No,” she said, “just one of a few ideas I’m working on.” She did not want to alarm him by revealing just how empty her armory was.

  “There used to be springs at the bottom of this ridge,” he said. “Though they may have dried up in the drought.”

  “See if you can find one,” she whispered.

  Time ran out without Dilman returning. She’d have to use illusion after all. Climbing a tree, Maigraith sat in the fork staring down at the road and the enemy camp. Shortly Vanhe appeared, looking up anxiously. “Are you ready?”

  “Another few minutes,” she said, pretending confidence that she did not feel. Her preparations had been wasted so far. The best illusion she could do now was also the simplest, just an image of mist on the road. But if the guards wondered at mist on a hot summer’s night, if they disbelieved, it would vanish.

  ‘Time to go,” said Vanhe, a few minutes later. “Ready?”

  She wasn’t, but she’d have to be.

  It was four in the morning. The night was cloudy, though the moon gave enough light to see the road. The First Army assembled on the brow of the ridge in their two separate wings. Vanhe addressed his lieutenants.

  “Go quietly,” said the marshal, looking haggard, “until the alarm is raised. Then rush the gates. The quicker you are the easier it will be. Once you’re inside I’ll send up rockets to light your way.”

  Maigraith released her illusion. The first ten ranks of soldiers faded to a silvery blur, a file of marching ghosts in the moonlight. A whisper of amazement passed through the army.

  “I feel better now,” said Vanhe, mopping his brow, surprised though he had known what she was going to attempt. “It’s worth half a night’s sleep to their morale. Send them out!”

  His officers ran to their posts. The two wings began to move.

  Let it last, Maigraith prayed. If only it does not break on the Ghâshâd’s defenses. But she had a horrible feeling the illusion was not going to last. Something kept interfering, and no matter what she tried she could not overcome it. There seemed to be a shield around the camp. Even this far away it was hurting her. What would it be like at the gates?

  Dilman appeared out of darkness. “I found a spring,” he whispered. “Not far from here.”

  “Take me there!” she snapped, feeling the illusion weakening already.

  Dilman led her down the hill to a tiny seep coming from the base of a ledge. A depression in stone held about as much water as a large washbasin. How much fog will that make? she thought, dismayed. Better than none, I suppose! Holding the spell in her mind, she plunged her clenched fists into the basin. A little patch of mist formed in the center. Hurry. It’s nearly too late!

  She concentrated harder, until the mist boiled up around her wrists and spilled over the edge of the depression. Maigraith whipped her arms out. The mist began to pour down the gully.

  Climbing onto a pinnacle where she could see the road, she saw her soldiers just coming out of the scrub. To her left the mist shone silver in the moonlight, now splitting to take different paths downslope. Maigraith’s head was aching from the strain of nudging her little pools of mist toward the camp. It kept running down the wrong gullies. Weatherworking was a difficult art—no mind could control something so complex.

  At last it reached the road near the main gate of the camp, reduced to a few wispy patches drifting with the breeze. Leaving it, she turned her attention back to the two marching columns, which were approaching the road at either end of the camp. Her illusion was fading, the soldiers beginning to appear. She let it go this side of the camp, where her mist was, and put all her effort into holding the other side.

  Those soldiers were still some distance from the gates when a roar came from the camp. They had been spotted. Below her the mist was evaporating into the warm air. The moonlit blur on the road suddenly resolved into a column of marching soldiers. They were still fifty paces from the gate. A bell began to clang furiously. Her troops surged forward and were soon involved in bitter fighting.

  At the same instant Maigraith was flung backwards off her perch. The illusion had been savagely broken. She lay on the ground in a daze.

  “Lar? Lar? Maigraith-lar!” It was Dilman, shaking her. “Lar? Are you all right?” He was practically in tears.

  Maigraith groaned. He lifted her to her feet

  “Lar, we need you desperately.” His voice positively dripped defeat.

  Maigraith realized that she was freezing, shuddering with cold for all that it was a warm night. How long had she lain here? “Don’t give up, Dilman,” she said with a lying smile. “I haven’t begun to fight yet.”

  They ran for the camp. Dilman had to keep stopping for her, and finally took her on his shoulders for the last dash.

  Carnage at the gates, so horrible that she could not bear to look at it. Hundreds lay dead within the sweep of her glance. She had ordered it.

  “Come on!” Dilman screeched, dragging her past the hacked corpses.

  The Second Army fought as if possessed and, Maigraith realized, probably was. How right Vanhe had been; how quickly her inexperience had been shown up. She had marched as hard as any, and with less rest. By now she was incapable of thinking straight. Her soldiers must be the same.

  Flares and rockets went up, lighting their path. One or two fell into the middle of the camp, setting a tent blazing. It was moot whether this advantaged them more than the enemy, though her soldiers did seem to be heartened by the light.

  But Maigraith was not. She had blundered and her troops were dying by the score. She had underestimated the Ghâshâd. Their will supported these puppet soldiers and weakened hers. They were the key. If she could not break them the First Army was finished.

  She sorted through her recollections of the camp layout, trying to work out where the Ghâshâd would be. It was beginning to get light. She staggered along the rows of tents, through a chaos of running people, burning tents and hand-to-hand fighting. A straggle of her soldiers ran past, weaponless, fleeing back toward the gate. Another band followed, running before the enemy. Maigraith attempted a concealing illusion but it failed utterly.

  A tall man with a sword ran straight at her. She gestured in the air, a spell that outside the camp would have had his feet out from under him, but it did not even make him pause. Lurching out of the way of his weapon, she hurried toward the center o
f the camp. He went after one of her fleeing soldiers, cutting the unfortunate fellow down with one hack.

  Maigraith ran around a corner, straight into a battlefield strewn with dead and dying, most of them her own. One of the enemy lay on the bloody grass right in front of her.

  Panting, she went to her knees beside him. “Where is the tent of the Ghâshâd?”

  The fellow was weeping with pain, mortally wounded. The front of his jerkin was saturated in blood. Putting her hands on his head she lifted the pain from him, a terrible wrench that she would suffer from later.

  “Where?” Maigraith screamed in his face.

  He raised his hand. “Three rows!” He pointed to the left, “The gray one,” and flopped down dead.

  Maigraith sprinted down the rows. The wounds Thyllan had given her months ago, shoulder and side, throbbed with each footfall. A great clot of her troops ran the other way. They, too, had abandoned their weapons. The enemy was pushing them back, showing no concern for their own lives. She could feel horror swelling inside her at her folly; she had sent the entire army to their deaths.

  There, the gray tent! Shadows moved inside it. No time to think. Maigraith burst in through the flap. Eight Ghâshâd sat on benches in a square, four men and four women, while a fifth woman stood inside the square at a table. They were as alike as clones; she recognized none of them. They were concentrating so hard that she had a few moments before they could react.

  A gray board marked with blue and yellow squares covered most of the table. It was scattered with clusters of counters that appeared to represent units of the Second Army, gray, and Maigraith’s own, green. As she watched, the woman at the table put out her hand and with evident strain knocked two of the green counters off the board with her gray one. A great roar came from somewhere outside. Maigraith’s head exploded.

  She moaned involuntarily. All their eyes snapped toward her. She felt so dizzy that she could barely stand up, and fumes of sickness began to cloud her senses. There came a stab in her chest, like a sword thrust—the mortal pain that she had lifted from the man outside. She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness. The battle was lost. All was lost!

  23

  * * *

  THE WISE WOMAN

  Yggur did not have a good trip back from Faranda. After leaving the company he rode south as fast as his meager sight would let him. He felt overwhelming relief at being rid of Mendark’s oppressive presence, and a longing for Maigraith that grew stronger every day. At Flude he hired two attendants and took ship immediately, but the vessel turned out to be a slow, rotten, rat-infested hulk that rolled in the slightest sea. Normally a good sailor, he was seasick for most of the voyage.

  Somewhere near Siftah they were chased by pirates, only the weather saving them. Then, as they sailed south down the Sea of Thurkad, dysentery spread through the ship, cramping their bellies and turning their bowels to water. The boat drifted for days, no sailors being well enough to man the masts. The drinking water went a stinking green and one of the casks of salt pork, when they opened it, was a heaving mess of maggots.

  The crew knew who to blame for their ill-fortune. The tall, scowling stranger, the half-crippled blind man they had taken on board at Flude. Rumor said that he was a sorcerer. The luck of this voyage proved it.

  One morning Yggur was woken by a disabling blow to the kidneys. It was bad luck to kill a sorcerer, but his hands were bound and he was cast into a dinghy with his hapless attendants. The dinghy, without oars or food, or even water, was pushed off and the boat sailed away.

  The attendants untied each other but left him bound. He could not find within him any power to defend himself or even loosen his bonds. They drifted for a day and a night, then next morning Yggur was woken by the sound of breaking waves. They were drifting along a barren, rocky shore. The attendants robbed him of his gold and slipped over the side.

  Yggur furiously rubbed his bonds against the thwarts, but the thick rope was still intact an hour later as the dinghy was driven sideways onto the rocks. It overturned. He was flung at the barnacle-covered outcrops, pulled out to sea by the surge then driven back onto the rocks again.

  By sheerest luck the succeeding waves were small ones, allowing him to crawl above the breakers. After sawing through his ropes on the broken edge of an oyster shell he staggered across the rocks until he came to a village.

  Yggur lurched up to what appeared to be the hut of the village headwoman. She was no more than an outline through his sunburned, salt-crusted eyelids.

  “Will you help me?” he gasped. His limbs and body were bloody from a hundred barnacle wounds.

  “How may we serve you?” she said in a rather young voice for a wise woman, for such he deduced her to be.

  “I need passage to Thurkad,” he said.

  “You won’t find it here.”

  “Then take me where I can. Please.”

  “That would cost all of five silver tars,” she said, as if she were asking for half the wealth of the world.

  He couldn’t bear to beg. “I haven’t a grint with me, but in Thurkad… I am Yggur!” he cried.

  After a pause the woman said, “I understand that you are a man of your word. You may send back the coin or… there may be other ways to repay me.”

  Shortly he had been stripped of his tattered clothes, fed a bowl of sea-urchin chowder and his wounds treated with a purple, stinging tincture. He slept in the headwoman’s own hut, the greatest honor they could give him, though he lacked the strength to do her the honor she plainly wished for in return. While he slept she had what she wanted from him anyway.

  In the morning his garments were returned, repaired and smelling of smoke, for they had been dried over the fire. The wise woman, her prestige now immeasurably enhanced, hand-fed him pickled fish organs. They tasted even worse than they looked. When he was done she bowed, the smiling villagers helped him into a canoe and he was paddled out to sea. A day later he landed at Ganport and immediately boarded a vessel heading for Thurkad. Such kindness, he thought, and they are not even my subjects. They will be well rewarded.

  Only when he was landed in Thurkad did Yggur allow himself to think about Maigraith. He’d heard about her humiliation of Thyllan a dozen times already. He would raise Vanhe to general, even commander-in-chief.

  On the wharf a ragged street urchin came hobbling up to him, elbowing half a dozen competitors out of the way. His dirty feet were battered, scabbed and covered in running sores. “May I guide you, sir? Please, sir.”

  “Take me to the military headquarters, boy,” he said. “And be quick about it.” He was desperate for Maigraith now. He would not shrink from her bed tonight.

  As Yggur followed the limping boy, he reminded himself of all the good things about Maigraith—her compassion for his pain; the clumsy way she’d approached him, had drawn him out of himself. It must have been very hard for her.

  If only she’d kept her glasses on. If only he’d not looked into her eyes and seen Rulke there. That had undermined him. Mortified, he realized that he’d shrunk from her like a schoolboy from the headmaster’s cane. But the barbs Rulke had left in his psyche were gone now and Yggur understood his folly. He had wallowed in terror like a princess bathing in milk; had even taken a kind of masochistic pleasure from it. No more! How different things were going to be between them now.

  Yggur suddenly felt immensely strong. Back in his own realm with his armies around him, he could no longer imagine why he’d been so afraid of Mendark, or of Rulke. Even his eyesight seemed a little clearer. The first person he met as he limped up the steps of the citadel was the messenger girl, Dolodha, though it wasn’t until she spoke that he recognized her.

  “Master!” she gasped. Then she shouted out. “The master has come back! Lord Yggur has returned.” She fell to her knees before him.

  Yggur lifted her to her feet. “Dolodha!” he said. “Faithful servant. I am almost blind. Pay this boy then bring me your indenture. From this moment you are free!”<
br />
  “Free,” she whispered. “But how will I live?”

  “You will serve me as adjutant, for one silver tar a week,” he said with the utmost good cheer.

  “One silver tar!” she exclaimed, as if he had offered a bucket of gold.

  “You want more? Then you shall have it. Two silver tars! Now run for your indenture. Scribe,” he roared. “Write Dolodha’s commission as adjutant. Where’s Zareth?”

  Zareth the Hlune was found and dispatched back to the village with a bag of silver. Dolodha reappeared. Her indenture was canceled with a row of official stamps and seals, her commission duly drawn up.

  “Now, where’s Maigraith?” Yggur cried to his adjutant. “Take me to her at once.”

  Dolodha looked uneasy. “She is in Bannador, master.”

  “Bannador!”

  “She led the First Army to Casyme to fight the Ghâshâd.”

  “What?” he roared. “When?”

  “Five days ago.”

  As she explained, Yggur felt his heart clutched in a vice, and it squeezed harder every second. To take an army into the wilds of Bannador, against an army just as strong, already dug in, and under the control of the Ghâshâd, was sheer idiocy. Suicide! Maigraith was doomed.

  “Who allowed this stupidity?” he raged. “I’ll break them. I’ll sell them into slavery.”

  “It was Marshal Vanhe,” quavered the adjutant. “Your generals are dead—”

  “Vanhe! I’ll crucify him! Get my horse ready. We leave for Bannador within the hour.”

  Such was his fury that the escort was ready to leave before that. They raced south-west down the Feddil Road toward Tuldis.

  The army’s path was easily followed. At every stop Dolodha leapt off her horse and ran, still in her ill-fitting robes and flapping sandals, to find out how long since the troops had passed that way.

  They did not stop day or night, though they changed horses in the afternoon and again in the middle of the night. That was at the city of Muncyte, a steamy, mosquito-ridden place on the floodplain of the Plendur River. All the buildings were up on stilts but still the city flooded every year. On they raced, by gloomy Faidon Forest that ran down to the northern border of Bannador. Reaching dusty Radomin town the following afternoon, they took fresh horses and hurtled on. Yggur’s mood became fouler and fouler. He could almost smell the blood.