Whandall shook his head, smiling. “You’re escaping. I’m being expelled.” And even as he watched the trail behind seemed to grow more creepers.
Travel went fast. The mare grew stronger as they traveled, and larger, but she wasn’t giving them any trouble. Behind them the trail’s outline blurred with green.
Coyotes had discovered the travelers’ abandoned middens. That was scary. That evening Whandall and Carver crawled under the wagon to sleep, back to back and armed.
A voice in the dark. “This magician who killed your father. Did you try to kill him?”
“No, Carver.”
“Good.”
Whandall believed he had nothing to hide from Carver: nothing so monstrous as the open truth of what he was. Still, sharing secrets outside the family seemed unnatural.
Into the quiet dark Carver said, “Did you know that plague is a kind of living thing? Wizards can see it. Wizards can kill it and heal the client. Otherwise it grows. Without a wizard, other people get sick too, more and more. We need wizards. But wizards don’t like the Valley of Smokes.”
“‘Course not. No magic.”
The dark was silent a while longer. Then Carver asked, “Why not?”
“Kill Morth? Why?”
“Your father.”
“Morth did what kinless do. Sorry, taxpayers. What we do too. If Pothefit caught a looker taking the cook pot from the Placehold courtyard, he’d’ve killed him.”
It was too dark to see Carver’s expression. Whandall said, “The Burning killed Pothefit. In the Burning you can have anything you can take. They couldn’t take Morth’s shop.”
Silence from Carver. The woods stirred: something died violently.
“That’s what I was trying to remember,” Whandall said suddenly. “Morth could follow us. I keep forgetting Morth. Carver, we wouldn’t see him. That lurk spell.”
Near sunset of the next day they reached the crest of the mountains and found two dead coyotes near a dead campfire.
Carver ran.
Whandall watched him disappear into the rocks. He almost followed. Coyotes might menace Willow and the children! But Whandall was trying to learn kinless ways, and what about the wagon?
Unhitching the mare wasn’t easy. She tried to pull the rope out of his hands. He hung on long enough to tie it to a tree stump. The length of it would let her reach forage. She had her horn if coyotes came back.
Then—but wait. What had killed these beasts?
He stooped over one of the corpses. Not a mark on them. Wide blood-red eyes, mouths wide, tongues protruding. He touched the slicked-down fur, expecting to find it wet, but it wasn’t.
He caught Carver far downslope at the next dead campfire. There they slowed to a walk, blowing hard. Willow and the wagon must have taken a full day to cover this distance. Carver’s hands held his sling and a handful of rocks cracked to get sharp edges. He said, “I wish I had a knife.”
Whandall said, “With that you don’t have to let them so close. I wish I had a sever.”
Day was dying. They smelled meat cooking, and they slowed.
They saw the fire first, and a young looker standing tall and straight, backlit, with orange-red hair falling to his shoulders. Willow had the horses tied and a fire going. Then a whiff of corruption showed an arc of dead coyotes at their feet.
Willow saw two men coming at a grim half-run, Whandall’s knife point, Carver’s whirling sling. She leaped up from her cooking and stepped quickly to the man’s side.
“He saved us!” she shouted. “The coyotes would have torn us apart!”
Carver’s sling drooped. He said, “Morth?”
Morth smiled faintly.
“Morth, you’re young!”
“Yes, I found this!” Morth held out a handful of yellow lumps. Whandall had never before seen the magician gleeful. “Gold!” he said. “In the river!” He stepped forward past Whandall’s knifepoint and pushed the gold into Whandall’s unresisting hand.
Whandall said, “This is dangerous, isn’t it? Wild magic.”
“No, no, this gold is refined. I’ve taken the magic,” Morth said. “Can’t you see? Shall we race? Shall I stand on my head for you? I’m young!”
Carver backed up a bit, and so did Willow. Here was no lurking spell. Morth wanted to be noticed. He babbled, “Gold is magic. It reinforces other magic. Look!” He leaped straight up and kept rising until he could grasp a branch twice Whandall’s height above him. He shouted down, “Not just young! I used to fly!”
He dropped lightly. “Give gold to a wizard, most of the power leaches from the gold. After that it’s refined gold, harmless. People use it as if it has value, but the original meaning was, I gave gold to a wizard to touch. A wizard owes me. Whandall, keep the gold. Morth of Atlantis owes you.”
Whandall put the nuggets in the pouch beneath his waistband. He asked, “Why?”
Morth laughed. “You’re guiding me out.”
Whandall’s fingers brushed his cheek: the tattoo he couldn’t see. “And every wizard in the world can track me?”
“Every Atlantean wizard,” Morth said, and laughed like a lunatic.
CHAPTER
37
Willow had roasted a half-grown deer and some roots Morth had found. The adults held back—even Morth, even Whandall, ravenous but following their lead—until the children were fed. Then they dug in.
Carver suddenly cried out. “Lordkin! Did you do anything about the other wagon?”
Whandall told him what he’d done. “But the mare doesn’t like me, so you’ll have to go get her yourself. Unless you think we should both go?”
Whandall enjoyed what Carver’s face did then. Leave Willow with Whandall? or leave the wizard with Willow and no Whandall to guard him? or take Willow, leaving the children alone with the wizard and the Lordkin and nobody who could handle bonehead stallions?…
“I’ll go.”
“It can wait till morning.”
“I should hope so.”
The night was black as the inside of a lion’s belly. Whandall had to imagine: Carver, Willow, Morth, the gently snoring Carter, and himself, arrayed in a five-pointed star in the dirt near the wagon, feet pointing inward, severs ready to hand. The children in the wagon. Hyacinth dropping over the side, sleepy and clumsy, thud, crawling away to use the pit.
“It’s the biggest burn patch we’ve seen. It took us all day to cross it, and half of yesterday.” Willow’s voice in the dark, wondering and content.
Joking, Whandall said, “This fire wasn’t mine.”
“Lightning,” Willow said. “Lightning hits the highest tree. It burns. Afterward the redwood grows in two prongs. Sometimes coals fall and a patch of forest catches.”
“Why doesn’t the whole forest burn? Woodsmen just go home when they see a fire.”
She said, “Patches burn, then they go out.”
Morth said, “Yangin-Atep spends most of his time in a death-sleep, but a big fire wakes him. Feeds him. Fire is Yangin-Atep’s life.”
A companionable silence. Then Carver said sleepily, “What if you don’t believe in Yangin-Atep?”
Whandall raised his voice above Morth’s laugh. “Carver, firewand seeds don’t sprout unless there’s been a fire. Neither does redwood. This land is fire’s home. Tep’s Town—”
“Valley of Smokes.”
“Smokes. Would have been burned out before I was ever born if some power weren’t snuffing the fires. Yangin-Atep is the reason fire won’t burn indoors. There’s a truce between Yangin-Atep and the redwoods, so they don’t burn. I tried to tell Kreeg Miller… a taxpayer woodsman?”
Willow said, “There are a lot of people named Miller.”
Whandall had nursed a hope that he was helping Kreeg Miller’s relatives. There was an old debt he’d never acknowledged.
Willow said, “Outside the forest there’s no Yangin-Atep. You could cook indoors. Get your food still hot. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Morth and Whandall.
>
“Well, I never heard of such a thing, but we’ll see.” Willow turned and was asleep.
Whandall rolled his blanket tighter around him, wishing he could get up and stroll around, knowing that a thorn plant or laurel branch would surely slash him if he did. They had left the rain behind. The sound of the night was wind and sometimes a tiny cry of mortal agony.
CHAPTER
38
For a time the wagon moved easily downhill with Willow at the reins. Then they had to use the severs, sliding the poles under nettles and morningstars and lordkin’s-kiss to cut the roots with the blades, to shape a path wide enough for children and a wagon. They could have used Carver’s help, but Carver had gone back for the mare and second wagon.
Willow spoke: “This yellow blanket, this we use to clean the severs, to get the poison sap off. Use the rough side only. You don’t ever touch it, right, Hammer? Iris? Hyacinth? Opal?” The children nodded. “This one blanket, because there’s nothing else that color. The blanket hangs here on the wagon tongue, never moves, so anyone can find it.”
They saw problems before they happened. Looked for them. They lectured each other as easily as they lectured a Lordkin male.
Carter and Hammer were assigned to hold the other children together. They moved fairly rapidly. Half a morning later, Whandall remembered part of the deer left in the wagon from last night. He dropped the sever, stood up—
“Whandall. Don’t try to save work. Touch-me venom can stay on a blade and brush off on the wagon and then on a child. Someone could sit on it. It’s clean when it leaves your hands, every time,” Willow said. “Understand?”
A blank face hid his rage. Whandall picked up the sever and wiped the blade clean. Willow had treated him like a child, a bad child, in front of Morth and the children. Carter and Morth both had the grace to be paying attention to something else. If Carver had been here, Whandall might have had to hurt him.
In a later, calmer moment, it came to him that she hadn’t spoken by chance. Willow had been watching, waiting for him to do what he did.
A stand of lordkiss blocked Whandall’s scorch-path, its leaves barely singed. Morth called, “Whandall! Don’t burn it! You’d strangle us all. The smoke is poisonous.”
Whandall had reached for Yangin-Atep’s rage and found only a dying ember. The fire god was leaving him.
They had to dig a path around the lordkiss. He thought of it as showing off his strength, to make it feel less like work.
In early afternoon they broke through the undergrowth above running water.
Through sparse branches Whandall saw a far distant mass floating in the sky: a cone with its base in cloud, gray rock and green-tinged black capped with blazing white.
Morth gaped. “What is that?”
“The legends said it would be there,” Carter mused. “Before the Lordkin came, there was a path through the forest.”
“Mount Joy,” Willow whispered. “But the story said you could only see it if you were worthy. One of the heroes—”
“Holaman,” Carter said.
“Yes. He spent a lifetime searching for this vision,” Willow said. “Are we blessed?”
“With good weather,” Morth said. “But I think my path leads there.” He held his arm out, palm down, and looked along it, first with his fingers together, then spread.
“Magic?” Carter asked.
“No, navigation. If your stories are right, we won’t see this again, so I’m looking for landmarks in line with it.”
“Looks hard to reach,” Carter said. Whandall was thinking, Impossible. But for a wizard?
Morth said, “The world’s most inaccessible places are the places where wizards have never used up the manna. I have to go there. Gold would keep me alive, but the magic in gold is chaotic. I was too long in Tep’s Town.” Morth ran his hand distractedly through his hair. “I need the magic in nature to fully heal. Too much gold would drive me crazy.”
He looked at the fistful of red and white strands he was holding and whooped laughter. “Too little is bad too!”
Willow led the stallions. The wagon lurched, and sometimes the children had to heave up on the downside to keep it from rolling over. Still, >matters had improved: nothing ahead of them seemed to need cutting. The vegetation grew right up against the shore, and it was touch-me all the way. But the river ran shallow at the edges, and the wagon wheels would only run a few hands deep.
Willow said, “We’ll find easier traveling if we follow the river.”
Whandall waited for Morth’s reaction. He’d been treating Morth like a friend who sniffs white powder: a dubious ally. This might be the chance to be rid of him. But Morth only said, “You can’t stay with the river long.”
“No, of course not. Wagons don’t go on water, do they, Whandall?”
Surprised to be asked his opinion, Whandall said, “Willow, people don’t go on water either.”
The way she looked at him, he flushed. She asked, “Whandall, can’t you swim?”
“No. My brother can.”
“I meant,” Morth said gently, “that the sprite can’t get to me right away, but he must know I’m here. Let’s see how far we can get.”
The river continued shallow. The wagon bumped over rocks. They had to run slow, where the still growing ponies wanted to run. Carter and Willow couldn’t leave them without their becoming restive. They’d grown large and dangerous, as big as Lords’ horses, with horns that would outreach Whandall’s Lordkin knife.
“I could spell them,” Morth said. “Gentle them.”
“No.” Morth was as twitchy as the ponies; Whandall didn’t trust his magic.
“Well, at least I can dispel the stink of tar!” He gestured, but nothing happened. The smell was still there. Morth frowned, then danced ahead, vanished out of sight. A fat lot of help he was… but it could be said that he was scouting terrain, springing traps that would otherwise wait for children and a wagon.
The ponies and wagon plodded on, veering around deeper pools, rolling over rocks, wobbling, tilting, held from rolling over only by a Lordkin’s strong shoulder, whenever Whandall hoped to leave this snail’s trek and follow the magician.
Carver wouldn’t have much trouble catching up, Whandall decided. He’d find a path carved ahead of him.
They were halfway down the mountain when Morth came bounding back, bellowing, “Don’t any of you lordspawns get hungry?” He gestured and sang, and suddenly Whandall’s clothes were clean. Even the tar stains were gone. “Now to eat!”
The children chorused their agreement. Morth roared laughter. “I could eat… the gods know what I could eat!” He faced the woods and raised his hands as if they held invisible threads. “Let’s just see. Seshmarl, a fire!”
Whandall gathered an armful of dry brush and set a few fallen limbs on it. His touch raised no more than a wisp of smoke.
It was not that he enjoyed being ordered about like a kinless! But Whandall preferred to hide how weakly the power of Yangin-Atep ran in him. And Morth’s hands still waved their messages into the forest, while white chased red in waves down Morth’s luxuriant mane and beard. Whandall coaxed the smoldering kindling until flame rose toward his fingertips. When Morth turned from the woods, there was fire.
Animals came trooping out of the wood. A gopher, a turkey, a fawn, a red-tailed hawk, a half-starved cat as big as Hammer, and a family of six raccoons all filed up to Morth and sorted themselves by size. The cat was smaller than the ghosts of the Black Pit, and it didn’t have those huge dagger teeth.
Whandall made a sound of disgust. An animal might be meat, but it should be hunted! Altering its mind was—
(Hadn’t Morth said that once?)
But the animals were strangling. All but the raccoons were reaching for air and not finding it, thrashing, gaping, dying. The bird tried to reach Morth, and would have if he hadn’t dodged, and then it was dead too.
Drowned. And a burbling chuckle leaked out of Morth.
Whandall r
eached for his knife. It wasn’t needed. He and the kinless watched as two adult and four half-grown raccoons stripped the feathers from the bird and butchered the drowned animals with their clawed hands, skewered the meat and set it broiling. The children watched in fascination.
The raccoons all spasmed at once, looked, and instantly disappeared into the chaparral.
Hawk had a miserable taste, but everyone tried it. Willow convinced the children that they’d brag about this for the rest of their lives. Turkey and deer were very good, and gopher could be eaten. They had safe fruit Morth had found, with his ability to see poison. It struck Whandall that he had not eaten this well since Lord Samorty’s kitchen.
In early afternoon Morth suddenly said, “Here!” and waded into the stream.
Whandall was startled. “Morth? Aren’t you afraid of water?”
“We’ve hours before the sprite can get here.” Morth bent above the purling water with his arms elbow deep, fingers spread just above the river bed. Whandall saw golden sand flow toward him, merging into a lump.
“Ah,” he said. He picked up a mass the size of his head as if it were no heavier than a ball of feathers. For a time he stood holding the gold against his chest, with his eyes half closed and the look of a man breathing brown powder smoke from a clay pot. Then he handed it to Whandall. “Again, for my debt. Put this in the wagon.”
Whandall took it. He wasn’t prepared for its weight. It would have smashed his toes and fingers if he’d been a bit less agile.
Morth was helpless on the ground, laughing almost silently, Hk, hk, hk.
With every eye on him, Whandall set himself, lifted, hugged the gold to his chest, and carried it toward the wagon.
Morth rolled over and stood up. Mud covered his sopping wet robe. He’d lost weight: his ribs showed through the cloth. His hair was red and thick and curly. His long, smooth, bony face wore a feral look, like a young Lordkin about to test his knife skills for the first time.
“That’s better,” he said. “Little more of that.” He walked back into the river and began wading downstream.
Willow repacked the wagon, Whandall helping, while the children put out the fire and wrapped the remaining deer meat in grass. Whandall said, “He never helps.”
The Burning City Page 24
