The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  Amourgin's lips were moving, and both hands, in a pattern that Bren recognized. A counting and multiplying mnemonic that merchants and scholars used for dealing with large quantities.

  "Oh, there's power enough there," he said.

  Bren's mind was working as well. "The hand," he said. That thing was carved on the palm of an open hand. Every folk I know, use this—" he thrust one arm forward, fingers up and palm forward "—use this gesture for stop."

  The two magicians looked at each other, then priest and scholar went to work. Powders tossed in the air, and words were chanted—words that Bren seemed to hear only at the edge of his ears. Magic was usually like that; he turned and watched the—guardian, he decided—instead. The battlebarge was trying to dodge it now, having failed to outrun it. That seemed to be working better. It raised one bare stony foot and stamped. Bren's teeth hurt again, as the fabric of reality shrilled to the impact. The barge escaped the foot; the blow of the sixty-foot stone sword clipped the barge's mast and splinters exploded in its wake.

  "A sentinel," Solmin said at last "A living spirit of anger and vengeance clothed in stone. Set here long ago, oh, so long ago to guard the pathways south. The Old Empire glyphs carved across it—"

  "—drew on the power of the One With A Thousand Faces," Amourgin completed. His skin looked grey. "They bound it, neutralized the activation spell all these thousands of years. But they wore with the rains. Then Darkist and his priests and Willek—"

  "—all called on the One for battlemagic," Solmin took it up. "A god is omnipresent where he's worshipped because devotion thins the walls between the Worlds. Here, away from humans, most of the One's local power was incarnated in This World, in those glyphs made by his followers so long ago. The battlespells drew off the power of the One within reach, emptied the theosphere. The glyphs dropped below their effectiveness threshold and their binding failed That thing, it'll kill all invaders here—and we're all invaders. Its got no mind, only reflexes. Whoever designed it is dead ten millennia and more."

  The guardian screamed in frustration and thrust with its sword The round tip plunged through the deck of the Tseldene battlebarge, then out through the bottom of its hull without slowing perceptibly When it ripped free the barge was already settling, water pouring through the huge rent in its planking and boiling out across the low deck. The screams of the tongue-less chained slaves belowdecks were even louder than those of the warriors above. Many of the warriors threw themselves overboard without even trying to take off their armor, and they sank instantly. Triangular fins cut toward the disturbance, swimming ant-tiny past the huge stony feet of the guardian. The ones who drowned quickly might well be the lucky ones.

  Most of the soldiers in Bren's flotilla were silent and frozen with terror; a few were shouting hysterically, or praying. Faces turned towards him. What do we do? they asked mutely.

  Karah sprang erect beside him. His arm went around her waist automatically as the canoe rocked slightly, the poles of the outriggers protesting.

  She spoke into his ear. "Bren… Bren, do all waterfalls hit the rock alike?"

  "What?" he said. What's she on about?

  "Do they all—" she made a gesture "—curl under and hit the rock below their lip?"

  Her eyes were alight "I think so," he said "Most of the ones I've seen, yes."

  "Then I think, I think I know someplace we can go. Back home—there's a fall in Farbluffs County—"

  He bent to listen.

  * * *

  Karah raised her torch high. It was only a piece of wood hacked from the canoe and wrapped with rags, but it cast a pool of light into the wet, olive-green gloom. More torches were strung out through the great cavern, ahead and behind, slanting up from east to west. To her left the massive sheet of water hung almost suspended, creeping down in eerie languor. High overhead was the lip of harder rock where the Tiram took its northward plunge. To her right was the excavation made by millennia of in-curling water, that left the chamber behind the falls a jumbled slope of huge blocks like a dice box of the gods. The air was heavy with mist, cold with a shocking chill after the tropical heat outside. The rocks themselves ran with the moisture.

  She looked at them, up, then at the water to her left Bren met her eyes and nodded. When the waters falling normally, there's no way in or out. There probably isn't any airspace here at all.

  Which meant, of course, that if the battle outside ended or the creature returned to unliving stone, several million tons of high-velocity water would hit them all at once.

  Probably worse than that, she thought. The Tiram had to be building up behind the falls, behind the water slowed by sorcery. Something rather like a freshwater tidal wave would come roaring over the falls and into the lake.

  "I should watch these bright ideas," she said—aloud, since there was no chance of anyone hearing her.

  The long files labored upward. She saw one trooper ahead of her with a musket over one shoulder and a keg of powder over the other, staggering doggedly over the jagged rocks that tore at his skin through his ragged, much-patched trousers. The burden of her sword, bow, and bedroll seemed a lot lighter when she looked at that. Her vision narrowed down to the path before her, climbing, crawling, sometimes rappelling up a rope anchored above with a pikehead for an improvised piton. It was a shock to see natural sunlight again, a gleam through the mist ahead of her. The fog in the air was thicker here, the falls dosing in as they threaded the narrow deft between the water and the outer cliff face.

  The torch hissed out Moments later she was choking, the fog turning to water droplets; then she was out in the open air and holding up a hand against the dazzle of the sun, sinking onto a rock and gasping for breath.

  Bren staggered out beside her, coughing. She pounded him on the back; he flicked the water from his face and turned to look out over the lake.

  From here the figures below were sand-speck tiny. Canoes and barges still dodged and spun around the feet of a bird-headed mannequin. Only two of the barges were left; they seemed to be trying to get out the exit, and the guardian was dashing to cut them off like the goalkeeper in a village hurly game. It was almost comical, once you were a couple of thousand yards away.

  Father Solmin came up, half-dragged between a burly trooper and Amourgin. Karah felt Bren stiffen at the expression on their faces. Priest-magician and scholar-sorcerer both shouted, then gave up trying to compete with the waterfall and pointed.

  Karah peered. Then her eyes flew wide. The guardian was moving more slowly… and the slow-motion waterfall was speeding up. Just a very little, but…

  Bren sprang to his feet and tried to plunge back into the chamber they'd quitted Karah wasted no time; she drew her dagger and struck once with the heavy leaden knob on the pommel, aiming at the spot behind the ear as she'd been taught Bren staggered, eyes rolling upward Karah grabbed one arm; Captain Tagog took the other, and XIXth troopers grabbed handholds wherever they could Together they rushed upward and westward, scrambling and lifting and ignoring their commanders feeble struggles. Behind them the noise of the waterfall mounted, and with it, a feeling of tension building to a breaking point—the same feeling that you might get by holding a human hair and stretching it between your hands, slowly, slowly—

  Snap.

  A roar like the ending of the world. The sunlight vanished and water struck; they threw Bren down and Karah flung herself across him, fingers clawing at fissures in the rock as a wave without ending poured across them. Red-shot blackness swirled before her eyes; the water dragged at her belt and bowcase and the tops of her boots. Grit and stones struck her and whirled away. Then the light returned.

  Bren lay unmoving under her. She forced groaning muscles to work and lifted his head, turning it to free his mouth and pinching his nostrils. Karah filled her lungs, blew into his mouth, again and again.

  Breathe, Three damn you for a lazy sod, breathe! she thought frantically. She'd done this before—it didn't get any easier or less terrifying. Then he ca
me back to her, coughing and sputtering.

  "Give me a hand with the commander!" she called, looking around.

  Most of their party seemed to have made it; they were on the very lip of the cliff, with the fells behind them to the east Rainbows arched overhead, and the ground shook with the pent-up water's release. Huge chunks of the cliffs lip were going tumbling down into the lake below; she could feel the rumble of it through her belly.

  Father Solmin limped up; Amourgin with him, leaning on Eowlie, and the officers with him. Bren gave them a baleful glare before he doubled over briefly and coughed up a cupful of bile. They waited patiently, all familiar with the effects of a blow to the head.

  "Thanks," he said hoarsely to Karah as she handed him a flask of brandy. "Now, who was the mutinous dog who struck their commander?"

  "I did," Karah replied tartly. "You were acting crazy."

  "Some of my troops were still back in there, corporal," he began coldly, levering himself erect.

  "Bullshit" Captain Tagog.

  "What?"

  "Bullshit Sir. Majesty, whatever. They were deaders. We lost twenty back there under the water, and I'm sorry for it. But if we lost you, we'd all be dead. Unless we want to go back and bow the knee to the Grand Admiral, you're our only hope. Not just the XIXth. You're the hope of Tykis, sir; if you die that sorcery-eating demon-worshipping bitch has won. Sir."

  Bren locked eyes with her for a long moment, then gave a brief nod. "All right." He looked at Karah, and smiled very slightly. "Did you have to hit me so hard?"

  "I was in a hurry."

  CHAPTER XVI

  "Beautiful country," Karah said. "It'd make a great ranch."

  She switched her sword to the other shoulder; more practical than leaving it on a belt while going on foot They'd been walking a full month since the disaster at the cataract, and she was just getting used to it. Although she still wished for Windrush.

  Above the falls the land sloped upwards, the river broken every few miles by rapids and smaller cataracts. The stifling tropical heat of the flat jungles and flatter swamps had given way to a springlike freshness, just warm enough to be comfortable. Rolling red-soiled volcanic hills flattened out every now and then into broad plains; waist-high greengold grass was starred with flowers and dotted at intervals with odd-looking flat-topped trees. Denser forests of juniper and cedar stood on some of the hills, gallery woods followed the many creeks and streams, but mostly it was grassland. It swarmed with life, beasts familiar and half-familiar and totally strange, herds and clumps in every direction, the air loud with birds overhead.

  She shivered slightly. It was all very alien, and too familiar. Her mind's eye saw pink waves and silver sand.

  Bren shook his head; they exchanged a glance of troubled sharing, both uncomfortable with dreams and visions. "Think you could break one of those to the saddle?" he said, seeking comfort in the familiar.

  The animals he pointed at were not quite horses. They were glossy black, but there were white stripes across their necks and forelegs, and their tails were more like a mules. Not bad conformation, Karah thought, with an experts eye. About fifteen hands. The herd stallion threw up his head and snorted at the scent of man, and the senior mares led the rumbling carpet of not-quite-equines away at a slant. Fast, too, she decided.

  "Depends on their temperament," she said. "And—"

  A shrill trumpeting broke the drowsy stillness. The column of Tykissians bristled with weapons, moving into formation with a neatness that belied their ragged, rawhide-patched garments. This time they were only spectators. A small herd of quasi-mammoths broke from the ribbon of trees along a stream; they were about ten feet at the shoulder, grey, hairless, and each had two downward-curving flattened tusks, like ivory shovels. Leaping among them were catlike creatures fifteen feet long, yellow with zigzag stripes of black. Karah watched one jump onto the withers of a shoveltusker, its own hyperdeveloped shoulders bunching and flexing as giant claws sank into the victims thick skin. The tiger's mouth was open in a ninety-degree gape, exposing the two-foot canines. They stabbed with blurring speed, and the writhing trunk began to spray blood in a great scarlet arc. Others darted in and out, slashing at the flanks and legs of the big herdbeasts. One went flying through the air, caught on the tusks of a big male, but the others closed in, stabbing and ripping.

  The Tykissians waited, tense. A lone survivor of the shoveltusker herd fled across the prairie, lesser beasts scattering from its path. The pride of giant sword-tigers settled to their feast, snarling and whacking at each other with paws the size of barrow wheels. A heavy scent of blood drifted to the humans. Others found it more attractive; a pack of several dozen hyenas gathered, each as high as Karah's chest at the shoulder, and thick-jawed wolves, maned lions, a pair of land-alligators rising on their stout hind legs and clapping their long jaws together.

  "Lets get out of here before the carnivores' carnival gets properly under way," Bren said. "In column—forward—march!"

  "I take it back about the ranch," Karah said.

  Other beasts were beginning to drift away from the site of the kill Herbivores, giant baboons, and the two types of upright ground ape they d seen on the plateau—the big vegetarian ones, and a smaller, more active breed that sometimes carried sticks and crudely-chipped stones.

  Amourgin came up with Eowlie beside him. They all looked better fed; anyone who starved here would die of hunger in a butcher's shop. Eowlie looked sleek and glowing with health, tanned brown, lithe as the great cats.

  "There might be a good trade to be done here," Amourgin said thoughtfully. "Ivory, hides, maybe dried meat—An Tiram is always short of meat, they don't have much pasture. Some of the new mammoth-drawn railroads around the falls and the rapids, and—"

  He shrugged ruefully, aware the two gentryfolk were smiling at his city-man preoccupation with commerce. "I found this, sir."

  He handed over the fragment; it was smooth white marble, with the figure of a bird-headed man carved on it. Unpleasantly familiar in form.

  "Try scratching it," Amourgin went on. "Looks and feels just like marble, doesn't it?"

  Bren raised an eyebrow, but pulled a heavy fighting knife. The point skidded off the surface; he hacked at the broken edge, and swore as it notched the fine Olmyan steel.

  "It's smallbit-bespelled," Amourgin said.

  "Ah!" That was Father Solmin. He took the stone and weighed it, lips moving soundlessly. Amourgin went on:

  "Sir, it's older than anything has a right to be—in a fairly damp climate like this, at least. I checked The smallbits—the smallest types of matter—they've been frozen by an embedded spellcasting."

  At Bren's blank look, he went on. "That's hardly even theoretically possible these days. Not enough ambient power, and no wizard now is capable of handling that much power without burning out his brain. There was a human kingdom here once, but perhaps even the gods don't know when. I don't think these people had iron, or needed it. They shaped the stuff of the world with Power alone."

  "True, true," the priest said, carefully wrapping the relic away. "The chronicles agree that the Talent and the worlds magical potential have both decayed since ancient times, but I hadn't realized how much."

  "I've done some tests," Amourgin went on. "The theosphere around here is hyperactive but unfocused. Lots of potential, but not used or directed much for a long time. It's swarming with non-personified spirits of wind and rain and animals." He nodded to a troop of the ground apes, who grimaced and chattered from a hillock. "Probably that's as close as our distant cousins here get to gods."

  Troubled, Bren frowned ahead at the horizon. To left and right—west and east—the mountains receded. Between them lay the waters of the Upper Tiram, and their goal.

  "Still nothing?" he said, pointing.

  "No," priest and scholar said together.

  "Densely shielded."

  "I do feel a flavor of Tykissian magic," the priest amplified. "But only a flavor. Very old, by our standards
—we're a young people, I realize that now. Primitive texture, but very strong, and linked to the power of the Three."

  "Whatever I expected, I didn't expect this," Bren said. Half a mile away, the tumbled ruins of a city sat atop a hill. Not a large city, and the ruins were overgrown with trees, showing mainly as blocks of white stone and an occasional column. Below them in the grassy plain were log longhouses, and the trouble was that they were entirely too familiar. In some of the more backward parts of Old Tykis they still built like that, like scores of big log cabins joined at the end. An extended family-clan would live in each. Strips of cultivated land extended out from the village, corn and roots and barley; a small round wooden temple stood by a well, with three carved pillars before it. Smoke blew the scent of cooking and new bread toward them.

  Striding over the tall grass were people. Half-naked in the balmy weather, most of them, wearing leather kilts and sandals. They carried spears with long iron heads, tomahawks and knives in their belts, longbows and quivers; some had coffin-shaped shields of thick hide painted in geometric patterns. They trotted in a dense mass that flowed into a crescent moon with the points towards him, several hundred—as many as his own command or more. Moving with smooth precision, if not formal discipline, and coming to a halt all at once. A small party kept moving toward him and the XIXths banner; they had white heron feathers in collars around the heads of their spears.

  Closer, and he could see details of face and figure. All tall, all slender with whipcord muscle showing under their tanned skins. Hair ranging from white-blond to sun-streaked barley color; eyes coldly grey or blue, narrow straight-nosed faces.

  They all look like Willek, he thought, only more so. like a bunch of immigrants right in from Old Tykis, except that even in the far north you'd rarely see so many of such pure blood—too many southron captives had been carried north in pirate raids in the old days. All with whirling tattoos on their faces and bodies as well. Like a war band out of the folk-wandering when the Old Empire fell, he decided.