Empire of the East Trilogy

by Fred Saberhagen

  Mewick kept his men moving forward briskly. “Wizard?” he asked.

  Loford, riding now in the middle of the file, was letting his mount find its own way, while his large blue eyes looked into distances that were not of earth or sky, and his fingers fumbled in a bag he had withdrawn from his pack. His gross body jiggled unheeded with the rapid ride. He took from the cloth bag a smaller bag of leather, curiously decorated in many colors, and from that in turn a length of sandy-colored twine, twisted into many strange knots. He rode on for some distance, fingering this absently, then suddenly seemed to come to himself, and with a throat-clearing got the attention of all the others.

  “Hum. As the signs and powers now stand, the only thing of any consequence that I can manage successfully is to evoke a desert-elemental. But even at best to call one up will mean some difficulty and danger for us all. At worse—well things could get quite out of hand.”

  Mewick shook his head. “You had best try. Our swords and arrows are too few, unless we can get between them and Rolf once more.”

  “I am wondering,” Chup put in, “how strong a wizard they have with them. Not that our pudgy fellow here is easily overmatched, but the Constable of the East will surely be well attended in that regard.”

  “As to that,” said Loford, unperturbed, “we will soon enough find out. Now let me do my work. No, keep moving. Just a little silence; I can raise an elemental as well as almost any other man, while I ride on beast-back if need be.”

  With fingers suddenly turned extremely skillful, he tilted the little leather bag so that there ran from it a thin stream of ordinary-looking sand, falling to be lost along the trail. Holding the bag in one hand while it slowly continued to spill, he used his other hand and his teeth to tug at certain places in the curiously knotted twine. One by one knots fell away and straightened out. Counting knots as they disappeared, Chup caught his breath. “We’ll all be sandblasted to the bone,” he muttered. But he made no real protest; heroic measures were called for.

  Loford’s art took quick effect. Looking to the northwest, beyond the enemy force, Chup watched the sandy land seem to shake out its dunes like wrinkles from a blanket, rising with the appearance of a single deep ocean swell as far as eye could see to right and left. Chup, who had seen similar things before, knew it was not in fact the whole earth lifting up, only surface sand raised by a great wave of wind, yet involuntarily he tried to brace his feet more firmly in the stirrups.

  Reptiles chattered and shrieked alarm. From near the head of the distant Eastern mounted column, one tiny mounted figure detached itself, spurring with seeming confidence toward the oncoming wall of sand that here and there took on vague shapes of hands and jaws. It would be the Constable’s wizard. The tiny man-figure raised its arms, and Chup heard Loford grunt as if he had received a blow. The stout magician turned his animal aside, slid awkwardly from the saddle, and sank down on one knee, eyes squinted shut, while his comrades reined to a halt around him.

  “Ah, Ardneh,” Loford groaned, “Ardneh, help! He means to turn what I have raised against us.”

  The galloping Eastern wizard seemed to be under no such strain as Loford suffered. Riding easily, he moved his outstretched arms forward and down toward the oncoming elemental; Chup, watching, had the impression of a tremendous quelling, quieting force. But it might almost have been the useless gesture of a child. The wavefront of wind and wind-blown earth poured on remorselessly and struck. For a moment or two there remained a tiny isle of calm, around the mounted Eastern magician, not much wider than his arms could stretch, in which air fell quiet and lifeless before his counterspell. But then he and his defended island vanished; the elemental rolled on unimpeded, reaching out monstrous half-living paws of sand and air for Abner and his fifty men.

  With a cry of relief, Loford staggered to his feet. Then the elemental’s peripheral winds and dust were beating on the Western men. Chup felt the sting and lash of sand, and the air was a sudden shriek around his ears. The bright sun, and his friends, were suddenly gone, concealed within the desert as it walked. When things cleared for a moment, he glimpsed the dense core of the elemental squatting some hundreds of meters to the northwest, right where Abner’s force had been. Abner’s force was still there, from the look of things. Out of the solid-looking clouds of raging sand came Eastern men individually, riding, staggering, crawling; and here and there fled blinded and demented animals. This elemental would not kill, at least not quickly and not often, but it would surely disable any human fighting force it settled on.

  Chup cried out: “Ah, for a score of men to charge them now!” But to charge and fight in the heart of the storm would be to put oneself under the same disadvantage as the enemy, and he knew full well the impulse had to be restrained. Mewick instead used the time gained to best advantage by getting his few men once more between Rolf and the disorganized foe. The reptiles, hit harder than any land creatures by the elemental’s blasts, were swept from the sky for the time being, and Mewick found a place against the steep side of a sheer jutting rock, where his men might hope to remain unobserved should the reptiles manage to come back, and from which they might sally out to sting the Constable again if and when he came on in pursuit of Rolf.

  Chup huddled with the others between sheltering rocks, muffling his face with his cloak against the sand. Once more Loford groaned. “Now they too are getting help from greater powers,” he muttered.

  The wind died suddenly, rose again, then came and went in fitful gusts. Squinting into the sky above the enemy, Chup could see that the Eastern wizard had at last been able to call upon some effective force. The elemental was broken into a multitude of smaller whirlwinds, each of which raised a cloud of sand and dust, but which taken all together lacked the purpose and power that the single great creature had possessed. He could see, too, that Loford had not abandoned the struggle. The numerous whirlwinds danced around a common center, and seemed to be striving continually to reunite.

  “The wind is no longer so bad we cannot walk or ride,” Mewick shouted to his men, making himself heard above the shrieking air. “Let us see if we can strike another blow!”

  Abner had lost two men to the elemental, one blinded permanently by sand, the other left crazed and unable to do more than whimper to himself. It was midday before he had his forces properly marshalled again, the hopelessly wounded disposed of and their riding-beasts and other useful property distributed among the well. The wind was now no worse than a bearable storm. He considered dividing his force, feeling reasonably confident that there was no superior enemy body anywhere near, but decided against it when his wizard assured him that the winds must continue to decline.

  The Constable cast a final look at his assembled force (the woman Charmian, dressed like a soldier and muffled against sand like the others, smiled bravely and admiringly at him; well, he couldn’t have left her at the caravanserai, there was no telling when he’d be able to go back) and got it moving forward again. Scarcely had they gone a kilometer, however, when there came a few more arrows down upon them, from a hilltop close ahead. One more man was hit. At the Constable’s order forty cavalry charged the hill with leveled lances, but its top was now deserted, and behind it several ravines offered concealment for a small force and the possibility of further ambushes. The Constable’s horn sounded a recall.

  Again they moved on to the northwest. The first reptile able to return to the column, between disabling wind-blasts, reported flatter, grassier country ahead, into which the two fleeing Westerners were making steady progress, while the seven others remained between the fleeing two and Abner. The Constable consulted his weary wizard, who confirmed him in his opinion that the two more distant fugitives had the huge important gem with them. The Constable ground his teeth and profaned the names of demons in his anger. He felt by no means certain of getting back the gem. Though the long hours of a summer afternoon still lay ahead, the sun had by now definitely passed its highest point.

  There now arrived a rep
tile-courier from the Emperor of the East himself, who was with his main armies in the field a good many kilometers to the south. The courier bore an answer to the Constable’s urgent dispatch of the early morning, informing the court that an object had been stolen similar to, but even larger than, that which had been used in the unsuccessful attempt to neutralize Ardneh. The answer from Ominor now was that the object was certainly of great importance, and the Constable must take personal command of the attempt to get it back. Also that he must conduct his search to the northwest—divination at the highest level gave assurance that the thing was being taken in that direction. Also, that reinforcements were being sent as quickly as possible to the Constable’s aid. The first of these, a flight of a hundred additional reptiles, began to arrive shortly after the courier.

  The West, too, Abner thought sourly, would doubtless be throwing in reinforcements, and there would come a hundred more birds to harass him through the night. As the reptiles came in, he sent them to scour the country far ahead, to try to discover where the fugitives were heading.

  Half an hour’s steady forward progress followed, before one of the scouting reptiles came screaming that the small Western force was drawing up in a line on a hilltop directly in their line of march.

  “Seven men? I wish they would make such a stand.”

  When he had got a little closer and could better see the hill, he realized the Western maneuver was not so foolish as it had sounded. The slope was very wide from left to right, and too steep for mounted men to charge up it at any speed in the loose sand. Once more they would take casualties from arrows and find the foe gone when they reached the top. But to go clear around the hill would let the enemy succeed in delaying them, without paying anything for the privilege... Abner quickly decided to spread his men out and charge the hill. He would accept two or three casualties to inflict one; he would be delayed little if at all; and there was always the chance the fools would stand and fight.

  The skirmish went about as he had expected, except that the Western arrows came down a little more thickly than he had hoped, so Abner left four men upon the slope. And when the crest was reached, the foe was gone, except for one who lay in the sand with the shaft of an Eastern arrow protruding from his head.

  At any rate the country from here on was definitely flatter; the harassing enemy would have to remain at a greater distance. He could see the six riders on a distant rise, as if beckoning him to follow. Above them (at a safe altitude) many reptiles were cawing loudly and circling in the sky; but his wizard motioned in a slightly different direction, and in that way Abner directed his troops.

  The hours of light remaining were still long, but inexorably growing shorter. Some of the reptiles sent to scout far ahead of the two fugitives began to return, saying they could find no settlements, no buildings, nothing that looked as if it might be the fugitives’ goal. Grass grew tall and thick in that land, the reptiles reported, and trees in ever-increasing numbers. There were many places where the two-legged beasts could go to earth once darkness had fallen, and finding them again in the morning might not be easy. How far ahead were the fugitives now? Several kilometers. It was hard to say exactly; the reptiles’ horizontal-distance sense, like that of the birds, was poor.

  Abner moved his troops at a hard pace, though both men and animals were weary. He had the feeling he was gaining. No more hills obtruded themselves to give the six skirmishers another place to make a stand. They kept half a kilometer ahead of Abner in the open country, and seemed for the time being powerless to do more.

  Just when it seemed that the day was going reasonably well after all, there sprang up another wind from dead ahead, erecting another wall of dust whose sudden creation bespoke the working of more Western magic. But this wind brought little pain to sore Eastern faces; it was far weaker (or perhaps more subtle) than the desert-elemental had been. This had been born in the sea of grass that lay ahead, beyond the desert. It did not blind and abrade with particles or threaten to kill with heat.

  Abner’s wizard was hard at work in his saddle once more, gesturing with a talisman of some kind in each hand. Whether he was having any success was hard to judge; the wind appeared about the same, able to do no obvious harm. The Constable tried to recall the characteristics of prairie-elementals, which he assumed this was. He seemed to remember that bleakness and tangled grass and natural wind were three components, but there was something else too, something he could not quite remember. His schooling in this branch of magic had been sketchy, and was now far in the past.

  They had left the desert behind them, and were struggling through the first of the grasslands, when he remembered the most pertinent characteristic of prairie-elementals: distance itself.

  His eyes told him what was happening, now that he thought to look closely for it. Beneath the feet of his riding-beast, and those of the other animals in his troop, the grassy land was elongating in the direction of their travel, like an optical illusion in reverse. Three steps forward were required to cover the real distance normally contained in two.

  With a shout the Constable called his magician to his side, dragged the wretch from his saddle, and beat him half a dozen vicious blows with the flat of his sword. “Blunderer! Traitor! Could you not tell me what was happening? Or are you too thick-witted to be aware of it yourself?” He yearned to strike with the working edge of the blade, but was not ready to leave himself effectively wizardless in the face of the enemy.

  “Ah, mercy, Lord!” the beaten wizard cried. “There be powers against me here such as I have never faced before.”

  Charmian had ridden forward from her place near the rear of the little column, and seeing that the Constable glanced at her but did not at once order her back, was emboldened to take part. To the unhappy wizard she said savagely: “One fat lout from the provinces opposes you, a man I have met before and know to be nearly devoid of skill, compared to what my Lord Constable’s wizard should possess. My Lord Constable is ill-served indeed.”

  “I tell you I am blameless,” the magician cried. He had fallen on his knees before the mounted Constable, while behind them the column halted.

  “Who has defeated you? What mighty power?” the Constable demanded. “If you cannot tell me even that much, why should I not take you for a traitor, or an imbecile incompetent?”

  “I know not what or who!” The magician’s eyes were wild. “I knew not even that I was being beaten, until your mighty Lordship struck at me, as—as indeed I must be grateful for, that I was not slain out of hand.”

  Charmian’s expression had changed as she listened, and now she put out a hand to Abner. “Wait, my good Lord, if it please you. There may be something to what this man says. There is one among our enemies who is subtle and powerful enough to confound most wizards in this way.”

  “So.” Abner’s rage was quickly transformed into calculation. He knew by now that Charmian was intelligent, or rather that she could be when it suited her; and she had come close to Ardneh in the past. “What more can you tell me on this point?”

  She looked at Abner with an apparent anxiety to please. “Little enough right now, my Lord. Let me talk with this fellow for a while, as we go on, and it may be I can learn something worth your hearing.”

  “So be it.” With a savage gesture Abner got the stalled column moving again-two-thirds speed was better than none—and then, grimacing, he got paper from his saddlebag and reluctantly prepared to send a message asking Wood for help.

  Charmian now had perfect reason for riding next to the wizard, and holding with him a lengthy whispered conversation of which no one else could hear a word.

  “So, fellow,” she began, in a tone remote and commanding. “I have saved you from the punishment your clumsiness merits. If you wish me to remain your friend, there is a simple thing you can do for me in return.”

  He looked at her with fear and calculation. “I am eternally in your debt, fair lady. What is there I can possibly do for you?”

  “It
might seem unimportant to my Lord the Constable, and I have not bothered him with it. But it is a meaningful matter to me.” She began to explain.

  She had not said much before the wizard was shaking his head, and holding up a finger to stop her speech. “No, no. If it were possible to cast a spell and bring down some disabling woe on those two fleeing from us, I would have done so long ere this. It was one of the first things the Constable asked of me, before taking the field in pursuit of them. But it cannot be done so simply. Conditions are not right in many ways—”

  “I care little or nothing about harming the man,” Charmian broke in. “It is the girl, Catherine, who betrayed me.” Her voice dropped lower still, hate tightening it like some rack-rope in a dungeon. “It was she who got them to manhandle me. I saw her smirking, gloating, over her little moment of revenge... well, I mean to have the last laugh over her. I must and I will. Find me a way to give me my revenge upon that girl, and I will reward you well.” She shifted her body in the saddle and saw his eyes go wandering over her, as if they had no choice but to do so when she willed it. “But fail to do so, and I will tell the Constable that which will bring his full wrath back upon you; it hangs balanced over your head already, and needs but a gentle touch to bring it down. I will say that it was not Ardneh at all who defeated you, but some trivial power.”

  “It was Ardneh, or his equal. It must have been.”

  Charmian did not appear to have heard.

  The magician—he was using no name at all at present, a procedure not unheard of among those of his calling—rode on in silence for a little time, sizing up with sidelong looks the woman who rode beside him, taking her measure in more ways than one. “No, no,” he said again. “From here there is no way that I can visit on this fleeing servant girl the tortures that you have in mind. We have no hair of hers, or nail clippings, or even anything she owned—hey? I thought not. Even a comparatively mild curse would take—no, there is no way.”