Land of the Burning Sands: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Two

by Neumeier, Rachel

  It was so like her, Gereint thought, to make an instant and correct judgment about him, mention and dismiss it in the same breath, and shift at once to a technical question. He smiled down at her. “I can’t believe you broke half a mountain range and built a wall two hundred miles long. Do you know, the blocks right up in the western mountains are just as big and well-formed, and just as neatly placed, as the ones over here by the river? I don’t see how magecraft could do anything like that, so I guess you’re truly a maker and not a mage, but I’ve also never heard of any feat of building that could even begin to touch that wall.”

  Tehre blushed and looked down, suddenly shy. “Oh, well… I’d never have had the strength to run the blocks so far without the power you found for me. And actually I think it might have been Kairaithin who did the last bit, up by the western mountains. I don’t think I did that. And maybe Beguchren…” She glanced uneasily over at the small, still, pale form tucked into the middle of the bed. “I think maybe he helped. Mages might not be makers, but I think he put his strength into getting the blocks to land right. I think he gave me the strength of the earth. I think…” She hesitated, then finished in a rush: “I think that’s what happened to him: I think he used himself up by making himself a channel between the deep magic of the earth and me.”

  Gereint followed her gaze. “Yes. I think that’s right. Someone pulled the power of earth up through the men, and I don’t think it was I… I thought I knew why he wanted those men to come with us. Maybe I guessed right, but I didn’t guess everything. I would never have thought it was even possible to do that.”

  “It was evidently as hard on him as on any of us,” Amnachudran said.

  Gereint continued to gaze at the still, small form of the mage. “Oh, yes.”

  “You recovered,” Lady Emre said optimistically. “Perhaps he will, too. All of you collapsed except Tehre.” She gave her daughter a proud glance.

  “It didn’t take strength to actually bring down the mountains, you know,” Tehre explained modestly. “Just an understanding of how things break.” She turned to Gereint. “You know, I figured something out up there when I was helping the mountains break into proper blocks.” She leaned forward, her eyes lighting now with enthusiasm, her voice rising as her tone gained intensity. “If you take the force with which a material is pulled under tension, call that the stress to which you subject the material, and how far the material is stretched by that tension, call that the strain, then the ratio of stress to strain gives you a very simple measure of the material’s stiffness, do you see?”

  “Yes…” Gereint thought he might, more or less.

  “Well, it turns out that when you run a thin crack through a material, what happens is there’s a tremendous increase in the stress right at the tip of the crack because the stress has to go around the crack and it just piles up at the tip. And the finer the crack, the greater the increase, do you see? You can calculate it—it’s the stress times a factor, I think the factor must be something like double the square root of the length of the crack divided by the radius of the tip of the crack. If you calculate it like that, you can see right away why a crack through any stiff material would have a critical length and after that length, the crack would run, and that’s why stiff materials like stone can’t take any tension to speak of, do you see?”

  “Well, I’ll just leave you children alone, then,” said Lady Emre, casting her gaze upward. But she was laughing at the same time, though wryly. “I’ll go find your Lord Bertaud, Tehre, my dear, and let him know our friend Gereint’s awakened. You can find me in the library, probably, in the unlikely event you want me.” She dropped a fond kiss on the back of Tehre’s neck, patted Gereint’s arm, and went out.

  Gereint nodded absently, but he was too delighted by Tehre to really notice her mother’s departure. “Fascinating,” he told Tehre, sincerely. “And useful. I can visualize what you mean, more or less, I think. You figured that out right there, with fire scattering in the wind and wrapping around that circle of pillars? Tehre, you amaze me.”

  Tehre blushed and glanced down. “Oh, well… I ought to have worked it out long before. Only I didn’t until I started breaking the pillars…”

  “So you reached up to the mountains, started tiny cracks in the stone, and then applied tension.”

  “It took hardly any tension,” Tehre said earnestly. “That’s the whole point. But applied in the right directions. And a lot of cracks, of course.”

  Gereint couldn’t stop smiling. “Of course.”

  “I’ll show you—” But she stopped, her enthusiasm fading.

  “It’s all right,” Gereint said gently. “Beguchren was right, though for reasons I don’t think he anticipated. It’s all right.”

  “You don’t mind?” But Tehre saw or guessed the answer to that question and went on immediately so he wouldn’t have to answer it: “You can’t undo it? Make yourself over again, in reverse?”

  “No,” Gereint said. “A maker can remake himself. But a mage’s skill isn’t in making. It’s like shattering a sword or breaking a mountain into blocks: You can’t change your mind later and put the material back the way it was to start.”

  “No,” Tehre agreed in a small voice.

  “That’s true for everything of importance,” Eben Amnachudran said quietly. He laid his hands on his daughter’s shoulders and looked over her head at Gereint.

  Uncomfortable, Gereint turned away and went to stand by the bed, gazing down at Beguchren. He asked, not looking up, “Your lady wife couldn’t help him?”

  Amnachudran came to stand beside him, Tehre moving up on his other side. The scholar said, “We all collapsed at the end, of course, but that was just a matter of rest. Tauban was torn up by a blow from a griffin—almost the only real casualty we suffered—though, if that counts, Ansant managed to catch a spear in the thigh, somewhere in the most confused part of the…” He paused. “Exercise. Beguchren Teshrichten protected us, exactly as he said he would.”

  By the scholar’s tone, he’d believed they would all die. Gereint nodded, without comment.

  “Emre could handle all that. But this”—Amnachudran gestured to the still figure amid the pillows—“this she couldn’t touch, and rest doesn’t seem to be doing it, either. I thought I might; I thought it might be some sort of symbolic injury—to the will, perhaps, or the heart or the self. But…” His voice trailed off.

  Gereint stared down at the small form of the mage. Then he glanced sideways at Tehre. “You were right. He caught the strength of the deep earth and bent it around his own strength and handed it off to you and me. I don’t think he’s injured. Not even symbolically. But I think he emptied himself down to the very dregs of his will and heart and self…” He laid one hand gently on Beguchren’s arm. It was painfully thin.

  Closing his eyes, Gereint sent his mind groping after the mage’s awareness and memory and self. He found nothing but emptiness… But within that emptiness, the deep magic of earth and stone, which filled the world, so that actually there was no emptiness anywhere. Beyond that deep magic lay an aching cold, as familiar to him as his own hands and mind… He glimpsed years scrolling out endlessly, faces and voices he remembered… He realized only slowly that they were not faces or voices he remembered. This cold magic was not something familiar to him. And at the beginning, the blank drifting emptiness had not been his.

  So he reached out to find that sense of emptiness, and into it he poured all the memories he’d caught out of the dark. He tried to fill it with the essential, intrinsic awareness of earth and stone and cold and mist… that slid away from him, but his mind caught eagerly at memory. No. Not his mind. A woman’s face, fair and smiling; a man’s face, dark and angry. A voice that spoke his name. Not his name, but… It was hard to tell which name was his by right, which heart, which mind, which self… The music of a spinet, winding through a familiar house; the music of a harp, notes drifting up to the sky…

  Gereint pulled himself painful
ly free of memory, up into that measureless, empty sky, and found himself blinking and dazed, in a small, warm room with the warm autumn breeze blowing the curtains at the window, with Tehre on one side and her father on the other. He remembered Tehre at once, but it took a moment for him to recall Eben Amnachudran’s name.

  On the bed before them, Beguchren drew a breath and opened his eyes.

  Beside Gereint, Amnachudran made a small sound. Tehre didn’t. She backed quietly away and ran out into the hall. Gereint knew she’d gone to summon her mother and fetch tea, and since Beguchren needed both, that was eminently practical.

  The mage’s white brows drew together. His eyes were no longer ice pale. They were the powerful dark gray of pewter, of storm clouds, of the last beat of dusk before full dark… Gereint blinked, realizing at precisely the same moment as Beguchren himself that the man was no longer a mage. He felt Beguchren’s shock reverberate through his own mind. That deep awareness of earth, the awareness that Gereint had learned in the desert while fire fell out of the dark wind and the wild cries of griffins echoed overhead—He still held that awareness, like an extra sense, like an extension of his very self. But Beguchren did not. It had not been merely weakened. It was gone. Burned out by fire, used up by merciless need…

  He did not say anything. There seemed nothing to say. Except he did not let Beguchren fall back into the waiting emptiness, which for a moment he was afraid he might try to do. He made him sit up instead, arranging the pillows behind him, took the tea Tehre had brought, and himself held the cup to Beguchren’s lips.

  “Is he well, now?” Amnachudran asked nervously—asking Gereint and not Beguchren. He leaned around Gereint, reached to take Beguchren’s thin wrist in his hand, set his thumb over the beating pulse, and paused. He was, Gereint surmised, enough of a mage to understand, if belatedly, what had happened.

  “He’s perfectly fine,” Gereint said flatly, his tone daring Beguchren to contradict him even in the privacy of his own mind.

  Beguchren’s storm-gray eyes closed. But his mouth crooked. He said nothing, but lifted a hand to demand, wordlessly but stubbornly, that Gereint give him the cup.

  Equally wordless, Gereint set it into his hand.

  Beguchren lifted the cup, sipped, and lowered it again with determined steadiness.

  Gereint took it just as the other man’s hand began to tremble. He said quietly, “There is a wall stretching from the cold lake above the Teschanken down along the river, and then west all the way to the far mountains. It is sealed with ice and earth on this side, and with fire on the other. The rivers are flowing with clean water again, and the country of fire won’t overreach itself again.”

  Beguchren nodded, very faintly. He whispered, “I’ll sleep now.”

  “A little more tea first,” Gereint said gently, and folded Beguchren’s smaller hand around the cup, steadying it for him to lift and then lower once more.

  Lady Emre hurried in with a plate of cakes, Tehre’s Lord Bertaud trailing diffidently behind her. Gereint did not appreciate the crowd, but he took the cup away again, broke the cake, and put a sticky fragment in Beguchren’s hand. “Eat that,” he said. “Eat it, and then you can sleep. But promise me you’ll wake.” He paused and added, with a measure of ruthlessness that surprised even himself, “You owe me that.”

  Beguchren’s brows drew together, but he did not deny it. He nodded again, very slightly, and fell asleep sitting up, with the bit of cake dissolving on his tongue.

  Very much as Gereint had done, Beguchren slept through the day and then the whole of the following night. And very much as Gereint had, he woke in far better command of himself. No one had to bully or coax him into eating honey cakes, and then porridge and eggs and cold sliced beef. He spoke to Gereint for a long while—or Gereint spoke to him: Beguchren wanted to know everything that had happened after his own collapse. Gereint could not, of course, tell him anything about most of that. Tehre filled in the part she knew, and her father described, though only in very restrained terms, the confusion and terror that had beset the company down by the river.

  “Until the mountains broke, and the great stone blocks came spilling down from the heights, and the wall built itself all along the river,” he said, his eyes dark and amazed with memory. “And we all fell, then, just fell where we stood—that was you, my lord, of course. Emre says she found us there at dawn. She and the other women carried us all out of a desert that was, she tells me, already trying to be good, ordinary earth, through breezes that carried the scents of warm grass and damp leaves. Before they’d got us two miles, the river came pouring down its bed… It’s not quite the same bed,” he added as an aside to Gereint. “I’ve been to look at it. The nearer mountains were so broken and leveled, it’s a wider, shallower river now when it reaches this country. Where the water strikes the wall, do you know, it freezes? Cold mists roll over its surface… I don’t know. It’s no river you’d think to fish from, now.”

  “Farther south, it will seem more familiar,” Beguchren said quietly.

  “Well, lord, I’m sure that’s true, and probably just as well. I’m not sure anyone would want to put a boat out in the river amid that mist.”

  Beguchren nodded, his storm-gray eyes unreadable. “And this Feierabianden lord? Lord Bertaud, yes?”

  “Bertaud son of Boudan,” Tehre put in quickly. “He helped us, helped me…”

  “Yes?”

  “The griffin mage told me he helped build and seal the wall because of Lord Bertaud’s influence,” Gereint added.

  Beguchren’s expression became even more inscrutable.

  Tehre traded a glance with her father, which Gereint found impossible to decipher. “I’ll find him, ask him to speak with you,” she suggested.

  “Please do,” Beguchren said softly, and sent everyone else away so that he might speak to the foreign lord alone.

  “Though I don’t know why,” Tehre told Gereint later. “Bertaud said he only asked perfectly normal, straightforward things. Just what happened.”

  Bertaud? Gereint thought. Tehre was so informal with the foreign lord? She called him by name like that, without even thinking? But he said only, “Perhaps he was simply tired of being attended by a crowd, and I don’t blame him.”

  “Perhaps that’s so,” Tehre agreed, and began absently to sketch equations containing the square root of the ratio of crack length over the radius of crack tip, or so Gereint supposed. She was, she’d said, trying to work out whether you indeed simply doubled that value in her stress calculations, or whether the multiplicative factor merely approximated two. And she thought there was some small additive factor as well… Gereint left her to it. At least any Feierabianden lords who happened to wander by would probably find the calculations even more impenetrable than he did himself.

  The day after that, Beguchren got up from his bed and made his way through the halls and out into the courtyard, speaking to no one save for a polite murmur of acknowledgment to an astonished man-at-arms at the front gate. The man-at-arms hurried to tell Eben Amnachudran, and Amnachudran told Gereint, and Gereint found Beguchren sitting, pale and exhausted, underneath a big old apple tree. He was leaning against its knotted trunk, his face tipped back toward the leafy branches, his eyes closed, looking so ethereal it seemed strange the light breeze did not carry him away.

  The tree had recovered well from the brief encroachment of the desert wind. Sweet golden apples hung thickly overhead. Their fragrance drifted in the quiet air. Amid the grasses, windfall apples buzzed with wasps too busy to notice or resent the intrusion of men.

  “You don’t need to fetch your own, you know,” Gereint said, sitting down beside Beguchren. “The children brought plenty right into the kitchens.”

  The smaller man smiled wryly, not opening his eyes. After a moment, he said, “It’s just as well. I think I could neither climb the tree for the hanging fruit, nor chase away the wasps from the fallen.”

  “You’re stronger. You think you can walk back
to the house from here?”

  “Oh, yes. In a little while. After I sit here for a few moments…”

  “Shall I leave?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Stay, if you wish.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a time. Eventually, Gereint ventured, “The Arobern will value you anyway, you know,” and then flushed, immediately realizing how stupid that sounded.

  Beguchren mercifully didn’t even open his eyes, much less respond.

  After a while, Gereint gathered his nerve and tried again, more simply and directly. “I’m sorry. I’d give it back to you, if I could. I suppose you can’t make yourself back into a mage as I did? Recover magecraft through the side door, as it were?”

  “No. I’m not a maker.” Beguchren paused, and then added, “We both lost what we valued, I suppose. It’s fair enough. It’s not that different from what I did to you. In reverse.”

  “It worked.”

  “Not in anything like the manner I’d intended. Nor at the price I’d prepared to pay. Not even in the same coin I’d prepared to pay.” He suddenly sounded exhausted. “Thus the world teaches us humility.”

  “But it still worked.”

  “… true.” There was a small silence. Beguchren said, “I suppose I’ll become accustomed to it, in time.”

  In much the same way that a man might become accustomed to being blind and deaf. Just so. Gereint did not answer. He stood up after a moment, reaching high into the branches for a couple of apples. He had a belt knife, but it was too large and clumsy a thing to peel apples with. If he’d still been a maker, he could have coaxed the knife to exceed its design, encouraged it to hold the sort of edge such delicate work demanded… He cut each apple in quarters, cored them, and handed half the pieces to Beguchren without trying to peel them. They sat under the tree and ate the apples, surrounded by the quiet autumn sunlight and the buzzing of wasps. In the distance voices called, indistinct but cheerful.