by Jim Grimsley
“But you know your art well, I’m told.”
“I’ve had good teachers.”
A moment later he asked for jaka and, since Imral was busy with the fire, I poured it myself from the oet. He accepted the cup with something like a smile. I guessed the first part of the inspection had begun, and, to tell the truth, I felt rather gentle about it. Why would he not be skeptical of me? How many Venladrii had marched out of Arthen to help us? How many lives had he risked, on me?
In response to their questions, I told them all that had happened since we met in Maugritaxa, that I had held Drudaen pinned on Yruminast for many days, but that he escaped me when I came down from the Tower. He had vanished beneath his own veil. Since then I had glimpsed his presence in Ivyssa. Where he had gone from there I could only guess. I had some other news, too, including the notable lack of response to our march from any of the queen’s strongholds.
I watched Evynar closely as I briefed them, and he studied me with interest as keen as mine in him. He saw me clearly. When I was done, he bowed his head. “Thank you, young man. You explain what you’ve seen very well. But explain another thing for me. Why was Drudaen camped in Vyddn for so long?” The question surprised me some, and I must have showed this, because Evynar went on. “It became his folly to sit there, but he did it anyway. In Drii we watched him, and wondered what he could be seeking that was so precious. Because even to us it was clear he should move back to his strongholds when you first took your place on Ellebren.”
“The Sisters said it was because of this.” I held up the locket, passed it to them. “He thought the Bane Gem was in the ruins where Kentha fell. Or at least he thought so until I showed him where it really was.”
“What do you think?”
“I can’t see why he would believe Kentha died with the gem on her. She would have used it against him, that’s how he would see it. So I wonder if there’s something else.”
Evynar held the Bane locket, studying the stone’s careful faceting. “A kirin,” he said. “Tervan work, I’d guess. The Sisters could not read the writing?”
“I never showed them the locket. I didn’t know what it was in those days.” I leaned forward to take the necklace from him. “But Kirith Kirin told me what these letters are.”
“The language is called the Malei,” Kirith Kirin said. “The alphabet is called akana. Edenna Morthul gets the credit for inspiring the priests to work on it. In the earliest age, the Cunuduerum monks studied a way to make a magic language of their own, and Edenna helped them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You should know the answer to that. Ildaruen can be taught. The Nameless Tongue can’t, or so I’m told.”
“That’s right.” I was surprised again to hear the words from his mouth so plainly.
“The Praeven were giving Edenna what she needed, a way to make magic that she could teach. When Falamar saw the threat this could bring, he made up the story about the song that frightened YY and put the monks to death. But all their lore books were closed up inside their libraries. You won’t find this history to be written down but we know it to be true.”
“The Sisters believed Kentha had found access to the Praeven books and that she was studying them,” I said.
“She was,” Kirith Kirin answered. “She had learned how to travel to the ghost city, she told us that. Her child was born there, I believe. And Edenna Morthul taught her the way to enter the libraries, which even Falamar could never do.”
“So Keerfax wants to learn akana himself?” Evynar asked. “That’s why he virtually besieged a ruined city for half a year? Has he figured all this out?”
I answered, simply. “Kentha built the Malei language into Ellebren Tower, to be controlled through the locket she made. He would have to know the Malei himself to defend against it.”
Kirith Kirin shook his head. “Maybe that’s part of it. But what he really needs is simply a way into Arthen.” He crossed to the window, flocks of catofars framing his head. “He’s always had that weakness. We all do, we who live a long time. Unless we return to Arthen we die like all the rest. He thought he had found a way around that for a while but he was wrong, apparently, or Athryn wouldn’t be sending for me to be King. If he’s looking for anything, it’s for a way home. Something to circumvent the magic that keeps him out.”
3
This interview ended and I left them in the room with a good fire going, to have whatever further discussion they might require. I would learn later that it is customary for the magician to withdraw, but I had no interest in staying for more talk, since Kirith Kirin would tell me whatever I needed to know. I climbed to the top of Laeredon and stood in the high wind.
A wave of cold air swept down from the Fenax, not a wind of my devising but a true blast of winter, the kind of wind we call an “early blade” in Upcountry, a corruption of High Speech, some say, but with thirty-nine words for cold and forty for snow. A harsh winter would soon grip all the lands north, the season that comes down like a claw; my name Yron is another way of saying Winter.
South of us, shadow drank the cold wind, pulsing and shuddering, a living veil. He had made it, he had thrown it across the land, and because his nature had cast it out of him, it was part of him, drawing strength that he could use. But while it was sustaining him he could never shed it, and the weight of it fell on him, too, partly sustaining and partly devouring. The portion of him that remained a living creature responded to shadow as a living creature would, and it taxed him, even though it was his.
Entering trance, tuning my body to the stone, I began my work. I need spare no effort for concealment or defense, since he had left his shenesoeniis for the safety of travel where I could not find him. True enough, I had no way to find him in the lands that were under his control. But I could make him regret the place he had left. I sang intricately and deeply without fear of interruption, because I had a High Place on which to stand, and I stretched out the brooding treble of my song toward his stronghold Cunevadrim, empty of him. Tearing shadow there, I bared the song of the place, tested its defenses, and began a long, slow insinging, an encirclement from afar, reaching from Ellebren with one hand and from Laeredon with another.
In my body of bone I held the necklace in my hand, stone over stone, and through this lens I traveled. Over the fortress of pale rock, over the mansion of towers fashioned by Cunavastar so long ago that to think of it is unimaginable, over this space I hovered as though I were brooding in a cloud. On that plane from which I was spinning out my thought I knew this was my place, too, that I had a claim on it, through him, and I gathered that within my thought as well and went on singing, the lowest, sweetest thread of music, sending the Words out far, the land and all its people under my eye. With such clarity I saw his home, his absence. One can hardly bring such memories out of trance, but I can remember the jagged towers, the high walls, the sheer, winding road.
Also, the rough edges of the silver locket on the skin of my palm. Here was a thing that had been made for me, by someone a long time ago. By someone as old as the trees. And me as green as a leaf in spring to hold it, to lift it to the clouds, to pray to the all-watching and all-encompassing that I might fathom something of what it meant.
For a moment, inside all that, spinning in that current of forces, I was only a boy, remembering my bed with Jarred, my dog, my father’s farm, my easy life. I was only a boy and the thing in my hand was only a piece of metal, something I could sell for gold, something I hardly understood at all.
But I had as much time as I wanted and no opponent who cared to show himself, so what did it matter to me how long I sat there with those thoughts in my head, those feelings, the numbing sense of it, that I was no longer what I had been, that all my early life was receding faster than the days could explain? A thing blossoming in me, a nameless creature. One who could reach into the stones of Cunevadrim, among the oldest of places, who could find the foundation of Yruminast and slowly, slowly, unbind the rock from its
elf, only the tiniest of tears in the fabric, the smallest song rending the smallest space, but it would be enough, and no one to stop me, no one to turn my thought aside to anything else.
When I sang through the locket, through the gem, I reached nothing, but when I sang through the runes I could feel the change, because when I did it was as though I stood in my body on Ellebren, as though I were divided between the two towers as before, and since this was not a magic I had ever learned I could only guess it was a gift from the lady who had made the necklace and linked it so completely to the tower over the forest far away. Once I understood that, I found my strength.
In the real world, throughout the intervening countryside, but particularly in Antelek itself, winds gathered as Drudaen's shadow was replaced by the beginning shreds of storm. Colliding masses of air roiled overhead. Cuthunre farmers took shelter, suspecting only that a winter storm was coming, the first of the season. The Verm, being more accustomed to the changeable skies of magic, took note that the skies had darkened with unnatural speed, particularly near Cunevadrim; they battened their houses in the hills around the great fortress and studied, as they and their ancestors had done for generations, the lights over Yruminast Tower, pale glimmerings against the dark rock of Durudronaen.
I could feel him now, though I could not find him, for I had been at this singing for hours and had penetrated deeply into the foundation of that Tower of his, I had begun to trouble his hold on the place, the link that bound this Tower to all the rest, the engine for making shadow over all this land. He could hardly have failed to feel it. If he had scorned me to my face when we met, he now understood the depth of my training and skill. Yruminast shuddered beneath my touch.
The telling of this takes moments. The doing required many hours even to get as far as this, so that by sunset I had merely gotten the project underway. But I thought I had troubled my enemy sufficiently, with no sign yet of any opposition from him. I descended briefly from the Tower while remaining in full kei on the ground. I walked within my body but I was also in the sky above, a dizzying proposition. I moved hidden through Telkyii Tars and into the rooms I shared with Kirith Kirin. The apartments were empty but a householder awaited me there. She hurried away to bring news of my descent to Kirith Kirin, as she had been instructed to do.
I waited at the fireside in the room used as his study. I savored the strangeness of the moment. Against my inner lids moved the tumult of cloud, edges of storm slashing eastward over all the land I held in phyethir. Within the kei space moved the syllables of song, the deep-singing which, amplified through the two towers, resounded southward over the heartland of my enemy.
Kirith Kirin found me near the stone mantle. “You’ve been up there all day.” He squeezed my arms in his hands as if wringing the cold out of me. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to find him. And other things.”
He studied my face earnestly, and I could see the edges of his fear. “You’re cold. Are you done for the night?”
“No, I have to go back up. Soon.”
“How long?”
“All night, I expect. I’m in no danger. But I’m at him for something that will cost him, and I can’t let up.”
The Prince won out over the lover and he nodded with that crisp, sharp look in his eyes. “All right. But I won’t go to bed again till you do.”
“Kirith Kirin, don’t be ridiculous —”
He drew his back up straight and stared me down. “I’ll thank you to remember who you’re talking to. I know a thing or two about going without sleep. When you come down from there, you send for me. All right?”
“Yes, Kirith Kirin.”
“Tell me what you’re doing. Up there.”
“I’m trying to shake him loose from Yruminast. He has to show himself or lose the Tower.”
Smiling. He knew exactly what I meant. Curious that this should relieve me of worry, in some way. “Which do you prefer?” he asked.
“That he lose the Tower. We’ll have a safer march south, if he does.” Feeling the vague stirring of apprehension, the wash of cloud and wind from the High Place nearly overwhelming the senses of my body.
“You’re hardly even here.”
“I’m here.” I kissed him softly, clouds wheeling around us, birdcalls in our ears. He laughed, sharing all this sensation with me.
I left soon after, as dinner was being laid, his friends to join him and to work through the night if necessary, ironing out the details of our southern march. I returned to the Tower and rose through the rune hollow into the pirunaen beneath the night sky.
Clarity. My song had thickened across the landscape and the brewing of storm shook his veil as far as Ivyssa and lands further east. His southern Towers were hard pressed to maintain that fabric. The darkening over Cunevadrim surpassed that of shadow, and soon the collision of air masses, some hot and some cold, produced a vast engine of air and rain and lightning, but most of all, wind, rushing in gusts over the lower hills and crags, ripping trees to shreds, making stone walls sway.
All through the next day Drudaen disdained to defend his High Place; all day he continued to sap its main strength into his southern matrix. Finally late in the night he yielded and the Tower broke off from the remainder of his Towers, falling out of the loop of shadow. Yruminast, freed of its burden, asserted itself anew.
This move was what I had expected, though I had hoped the gesture would reveal his location. But nevertheless it was what I had sought. I continued to bring my whole thought to bear against Yruminast, my song swelling deep within the stones, in spite of the Tower’s renewed resistance. Stone break away from stone, stone eat stone, stone burn stone break. Stone break away from stone, stone eat stone, stone burn stone break. Stone to fire stone to smoke stone to sky.
When the time came, the storm raging at the peak of its fury, from my two Towers I sent this song flowing, but so focused, in such a small place in the deep rock, to tear it completely, as I pictured it, the tiniest of tears but completely, and for a moment I saw into a new space and wondered what it was, and I made a movement there, and I felt the rock shudder, all in a moment, and the whole summit shook. Fire flashed upward from the base rock and poured from the eyestone. On the southwest horizon swelled a dome of radiance, lighting the countryside like day. The fireworks were plainly visible beyond the wall of storms, and even in Genfynnel in the middle of the night people rushed to the walls, under storm clouds that were beginning to dump their load of rain across the city. I continued my calm singing through all this; I kept my eye over Yruminast; my song in the stones did its deep work and the force that I released cracked the Tower foundations.
At the last moment, before Yruminast could be wholly broken, deeper magics were brought into play to bind the stones against me. This required no intervention on the part of Drudaen, being a function of the Tower’s Tervan construction. Our two songs struggled, my magic of unbinding against the ruling magic of the Tower stones; and that struggle I did not win. But the shaking of combat damaged the Tower badly, and my song remained malignant within the Tower. Yruminast would be of no more use to him until he returned to it himself in his body, to cleanse it of the magic I had set into its rocks and walls, and to heal the foundation rock if he could.
He had kept the secret of his whereabouts, but at a high cost. With the power of Yruminast eliminated, I broke shadow as far south as Vulnusmurgul and set my hand over all of the Barrens and the cities of the Verm.
Near dawn the horizon went mad with color, storm clouds breaking apart in iridescent rags and the last forks of lightning slashing across the landscape. The Genfynnel walls were crowded with citizens who had watched the light show through the long night. What would have happened, I wondered, if all this celestial commotion had heralded the return of Drudaen to suzerainty over them? If he had come riding like white shadow across the countryside, what would these people have done?
Dawn uncoiled golden over a land in the clear aftermath of storm. The cou
ntryside of Antelek lay in shreds. Verm wandered, homeless and dazed, some wounded, under shadowless sky. They gathered their dead out of the wrecks of their homes and burned them, same as anyone would have done. I saw none of this, having descended from the Tower. But I have heard the tales all my life since. The magic that won me freedom from fear of Yruminast and which secured our southern march cost many Verm their lives. My storms damaged winter crops and broke buildings along a wide swath of terrain. In those places I am remembered as a marauder and killer.
Least damaged of all these places was Cunevadrim itself, the unshakable fortress on its awesome rock. I had fractured the Tower but not broken it, and the citadel beneath remained nearly unaffected. Drudaen had his stronghold still; to use it, he had only to return there.
I cannot tell you if I knew then, emerging from trance on that High Place, that I was once again a killer. But I remember the heaviness that settled on me when I emerged from Laeredon into a shower of rain. Moving hidden, I listened to the sentries chattering in small sentences about the lights in the sky, that was some storm, right? Haven’t seen anything like that before. Not in my lifetime. No, I thought, I dare say you have not. You’ll be lucky if you never live to see it again.
