The Saprano Sorceress

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  "Are you awake, Lady Anna?"

  "No. I'm still sleeping," she answered after taking a long swallow.

  Wisely, Daffyd did not reply.

  For a time, she just sat and sipped the water, looking around. Daffyd had set up camp under a rocky overhang that was several hundred yards uphill from the winding trail he had said once had been a main road. It didn't look like it had ever been anything but a trail, but she wasn't exactly the expert on Erdean roadworks.

  The air remained clear, and the sun pounded down. She was glad their crude campsite remained in the shade.

  To the south Farinelli and the mare grazed on the scattered clumps of mostly brown grass. To the north, Anna thought, there was a thin twisting plume of smoke—the fires of the Ebrans? Or the burning ruins of the fort?

  She looked at her boots, sitting by the bedroll. Finally, she corked the water bottle and pulled on one, then the other. She tried standing up, and every muscle in her body suggested that she was well over a century old. The faded green trousers sagged, and she had to retie the belt even tighter.

  "You should eat something," Daffyd ventured. "There is travel bread and cheese in the cloth there. I left it out for you."

  "Thank you." Anna limped toward it, bending slowly to retrieve the food off the rock ledge.

  The cheese was hard, and the bread stale, but Anna had no trouble eating everything. Daffyd was packing his gear on the gray mare before Anna finished off her breakfast with more water.

  After beating the dust out of the floppy-brimmed hat that seemed to have followed her, she went through her saddlebags, but everything was there. "Did you pack these?"

  "No. Palian threw everything in there while I was carrying you down the steps. I put the mandolin in, though."

  "Thank you."

  "You're welcome, Lady Anna."

  Anna carried everything over to Farinelli. The gelding ignored her and kept trying to nibble on anything remotely green.

  "I can't get you water unless we get you saddled."

  Farinelli kept grazing.

  After looking at Farinelli, and wondering if she really wanted to ride however many leagues it was to Synope, Anna fumbled the blanket in place, and then the saddle.

  As she lifted the saddle, she frowned, realizing that her shoulder didn't even twinge, that there wasn't even a trace of soreness there. Once she fastened both cinches, she looked at her left hand—there was only the faintest thread of a white line there—if that. Hadn't there always been a line there? She crooked her head and pulled her shirt and tunic forward. There wasn't even a scab where the arrow wound had been, and she could tell her stomach was flatter than it had been in years.

  She shivered, but Farinelli brought her back to reality with a long whuffling sound and a toss of his head.

  "I know. You're hungry and thirsty."

  "What?" said Daffyd.

  "We need to find water for the horses." Anna fastened the saddlebags in place. And for me, before I get so dehydrated I can't function.

  "We will."

  The sorceress wished she were that certain. Perhaps she could use a variant of the cool-water spell to bring some to the surface—but she'd have to be close to where there was water underground, and she was a singer, not a geologist. She took a deep breath. The needles still stabbed into her brain, and she knew she was only a singer, when she needed to be so much more.

  41

  Anna pulled off her hat, wiped away the thin film of muddy dust that collected on her forehead, then readjusted the hat, and reached for the water bottle. Farinelli walked stolidly down the gentle downgrade into another dry valley, filled with sandy red dirt, a handful of twisted juniper-like trees, more than a few barren and dead tree trunks, and scattered clumps of browned grass.

  "Is it like this all the way?" she asked.

  "I suppose so." Daffyd's voice was hoarse, and he glanced back over his shoulder. "It didn't used to be this way. There were more trees and grass."

  "Drought," Anna said, half standing in the stirrups to relieve the hardness of the saddle, except that her legs protested the extra effort. If the second day on the back road to Synope had been hard, the third had been even worse,, and it was only early afternoon. They had no travel food, just the water Anna had been able to call from dry creek-beds—enough for the horses, and to fill the water bottles.

  The sun continued to beat down, and Anna's face felt raw and burned, despite the hat, and the needle-stabbing headache seemed constant. Her muscles remained sore, especially around her stomach and in her legs, since she still wasn't that used to riding, although she.had the feeling, if she stayed in Erde, that would change.

  If? she thought. Brill might have been able to figure out a way to get her back… and he was dead. Daffyd was bright enough, but, as for visualizing earth… ? And the business of some people being burned when they tried it— that was another question. She shook her head, and her eyes stung, wondering what Mario and Elizabetta thought, won-dering why she was being so punished for thinking that she just wanted to get away—anywhere.

  She forced a deep breath. Anywhere was where she was. She'd laughed about the old saying "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it." It didn't seem quite so funny at the moment.

  Daffyd glanced back over his shoulder again.

  Anna turned in her saddle to follow his eyes. Was there dust in the air, not from their slow progress, but from some other traveler? Not many travelers took the trail they were on. Anna hadn't been able to make out either a hoofprint or a wagon track, but she was no tracker. "Does anyone use this road anymore?''

  "It's not overgrown," Daffyd said.

  "Nothing grows here," Anna pointed out.

  "Oh…"

  Anna looked back again.

  The group that appeared at the hill-crest of the trail behind them, little farther than a dek back, was more than just a few riders. Anna squinted. The others were moving at a trot, clearly aimed at catching up with them.

  "There are eight of them," Daffyd said. "They don't look like soldiers."

  "What are they?"

  Daffyd urged the gray mare to move at a quick walk.

  "I take it that means they aren't friendly?"

  "They don't have pack animals, and they're trying to catch us. I think they must be bandits, but I've never seen or heard of any here."

  "You told me this was a main road, too," Anna said, urging Farinelli to move more quickly. "Times have changed, it looks like."

  "I didn't know."

  Anna snorted. How many times had she heard that from students? Then, are you any better? You didn't know that wishing to be anywhere else would lead to this. Why couldn't you have just been happy to stay in Ames?… Singing for the Founders or whatever, even dealing with Dieshr and her snide comments from her high position as chair, is better than fighting battles, starving, and being chased by bandits with no good in mind.

  She looked back again. The dust given off by the bandits was rising higher, as if they had spurred their mounts into a quick trot now that they were on the flat.

  "Can't you do something?" asked Daffyd.

  "What do you suggest?"

  "Anything. They'll kill us for sure."

  Anna's stomach congealed in a cold lump. After an instant of frozen silence, she asked, "Are you sure?"

  "Bandits are killed, even if they spare their victims." Anna twisted toward the saddlebags, fumbling open the right one, then closing it and opening the left one in her search for the mandolin. Where was it? Finally, she lifted the mandolin out and slipped the strap over her neck, trying to ignore the tightening in her shoulder.

  If only Daffyd had been able to finish the lutar—although it really wasn't either a lute or a guitar—she would have felt happier. The mandolin was tinny, and it didn't project far enough.

  What could she sing? Their pursuers weren't armsmen, and she'd learned that the words targeting a spell-subject had to be fairly precise. Bandits, evildoers, villains… what were t
hey?

  The pursuing horsemen were closer, perhaps half a dek, and she could see several bare blades, and at least one bow.

  "Aren't you going to do something?" asked Daffyd.

  "I'm thinking," she snapped. Only nursery rhymes seemed to go through her head, like "Sing a song of sixpence …"

  An arrow skidded across the ground, leaving a line of dust in the road thirty yards behind them.

  "'Sing a song of .:. what?" she murmured. "Villains?" Then what? It was hard to think and ride.

  Then she had the words. They weren't great, but they just might work.

  She began to strum the strings, hoping the mandolin was close enough to being in tune, but her fingers fumbled and the chords were off, and she was about to fall off Farinelli because she wasn't good enough to ride and sing and play all at once.

  She reined up and turned Farinelli so she faced the oncoming riders.

  "What are you doing?" Daffyd looked back, but didn't slow his mare.

  A handful of arrows flew toward her, the closest going by her left shoulder. Holding back a shiver, trying to keep her voice relaxed—how was she supposed to do that with people shooting at her?—Anna cleared her throat and began the simple chords to an even simpler song.

  'Sing a song of villains, stop them as I can; four and twenty arrows shoot into each man. If that is not enough, then wrap their necks in stringing; now isn't that a better way to stop their evil singing?"

  Anna winced at the lousy rhyme, but tried to visualize what she had in mind. Again, she got the sensation of a giant harp vibrating behind the bright blue sky, and a shuddering wrench of the ground.

  Farinelli half whinnied, half whuffled, and Anna patted his shoulder, then squinted through the sudden dust. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach in place. Eight trussed bodies lay on the road, eight bodies that looked like pincushions.

  That was the way her head felt, even more so after the spell.

  Behind her, she could hear the ugly sound of Daffyd retching. Do something, he'd said. They'll kill us. She had, and now he was retching.

  Anna turned Farinelli toward the bandits' horses. Queasy or not, she and Daffyd could use food, coins, whatever the raiders might have. She swallowed again, but she left the mandolin out, strapped around her neck.

  One by one, she went through the wallets. At least with the big belt wallets, she didn't have to dig through the bandits' pockets.

  She noticed something strange. The bandit's quiver was empty, and he had neither bow nor bow string—yet she had seen both.

  After the second bandit, a good-looking blond young man of that sort vaguely similar to Mario, she did lose it, retching into the dusty dirt beyond the shoulder of the road. She looked over. Daffyd still leaned against his gray mare.

  She tightened her lips and went back to looting, thinking as she did. No one asked me if I wanted to be here. No one's providing for me, either, and Daffyd wanted me to use sorcery. And this bandit wasn't Mario. Mario wouldn't rob and kill people.

  In the end, she had a half dozen gold coins and over a dozen silvers, not to mention a large handful of coppers. She stuffed most into her wallet, looking up as Daffyd rode the mare toward her slowly. His face was pale.

  "Do you need any help?"

  "Yes. Gather all the food and water bottles they had and pack it on two of their mounts—the two best ones."

  "What about the others?"

  "Take off their bridles and saddles and let them run."

  "They're valuable," Daffyd protested.

  "What would happen if we rode into Synope with ten horses?" Anna asked, proud of herself for thinking about it. She recalled her grandfather's words, and expletives, about horse thieves. "We can explain two extra mounts as left from casualties from the battle, but ten?"

  Daffyd nodded stolidly.

  "Do you need some coins?" Anna asked.

  Daffyd shook his head.

  Anna walked over to the young player. "Take these, at least, as payment for finishing that lutar."

  "I haven't…"

  "You will."

  "Yes, Lady Anna." After accepting the two silvers and some coppers and putting them in his wallet, he slowly rode toward the most distant bandit mount, and Anna turned to the one nearest her. What does he expect? He's like a kid whose watched violence on TV, and then he sees it close and learns what it's like. She shook her head. She had no doubts about what the bandits would have done to them, to her.

  All the bandits' quivers had been empty, she realized. Then she nodded to herself. Brill had said spells basically rearranged things from nearby material—probably most of the arrows had been the bandits' own, and the particolored string they were wound in had probably been their blankets.

  Her knees began to shake, and she ate the first food she could find in the bandits' saddlebags—travel bread so dried that the stale stuff she'd finished the morning before seemed fresh by corhparison.

  What had she become? Killing people with spells, eating barely edible food, and justifying it?

  Her eyes burned… but she continued, to eat, if more slowly, more deliberately. Shortly, Daffyd joined her, but he did not look directly at her.

  42

  Wei, Nordwei

  Gretslen slips into the armless wooden chair, her face expressionless under the short blonde hair, the green eyes intent upon Ashtaar.

  "While your reports are quite clear about what the Ebrans are doing," begins the spymistress, "I find that I need more explanations for the Council on what they are not doing. We had anticipated that Behlem's forces would already be in Fal-cor and that Eladdrin would be at least to Pamr by now. Instead, the Ebrans, after having crushed the Defalkans and killed Lord Barjim and his too-capable consort, squat a few leagues inside the border. Is that not so, Gretslen?'' Ashtaar steeples her fingers, and her dark eyes flash.

  "They have taken Lord Brill's hall and outbuildings in Mencha, and the surrounding farms and dwellings. The sorcerer's hall is easily suited for a base of operations, still within ten leagues of the Sand Pass. They are also rebuilding the Defalkan fort there." Gretslen's tone is level.

  "Both are late Lord Brill's masterpieces, no doubt?" Ashtaar frowns. "What do they do there that is so vital?"

  "They have established a continuous resupply from Synek, and they are rebuilding their forces. Their losses were substantial, as I noted."

  "From the purported mist-world sorceress? Any sorceress that powerful would be transformed to cinders crossing the worldgates. Are you certain it was not Brill?"

  "Lord Brill was dead when more than half the Ebran armsmen were flayed with fire." Gretslen's eyes flicker to the window, through which she sees an afternoon storm above the harbor.

  Ashtaar's fingers close around the dark oval of polished stone before her. "The waters could be wrong."

  "They could be."

  "You do not think so, do you?"

  "No, honored Ashtaar."

  The spymistress sets down the dark oval no larger than her clenched fist. "This is troubling. A sorceress that powerful cannot cross from the mist worlds. There was no sorceress that powerful known in Liedwahr, and there has not been one that strong since the time of Vereist. You do not know where she is? How can that be? The waters can surely trace that kind of power."

  "The waters show her image. She is riding, with a single companion, somewhere in Defalk." Gretslen shrugs. "After the drought, one part of Defalk looks much like another."

  Ashtaar nods. "Then keep watching, and let me know. What of the travel-sorceress?"

  "A team was dispatched the afternoon you requested it, but they have had to avoid the fleeing soldiers."

  "This is vexing, Gretslen. Is the sorceress also the reason for Behlem's caution?"

  "I could not tell you that with certainty, but his seers have used their waters to scry the battle."

  "So this unknown sorceress gives Behlem pause, and nearly destroys the Ebrans. We don't know who she is, or where exactly she is. We don't know wh
ere her loyalties lie. In the meantime, Eladdrin is wary enough not to move until he has far more armsmen than he needs, and Behlem has learned caution." Ashtaar pauses. "Very vexing. Defalk should have fallen easily."

  "Most of the armsmen fled as we planned," points out Gretslen.

  "Except those of Lord Jecks."

  "We could not subvert them, as we noted."

  "What is Jecks doing?"

  "His forces are quick-marching to Falcor."

  "Gretslen…"

  "I only scried that a few moments ago," answers the blonde hurriedly.

  "What a dissonant mess…". mutters Ashtaar before looking up. "Is there anything else? Anything else that the Council could spring on me?"

  "Well… this sorceress works only with a mandolin, not with players."

  "Donner save us… You're certain?"

  "Yes, Ashtaar."

  "I suggest you consider a method for removing the sorceress. No… don't send anyone… not yet… but consider it. Consider it carefully." Ashtaar offers a hard smile.

  43

  From the hillside to the northeast, where Farinelli carried Anna steadily down the dusty road that they had reached earlier in the day, Synope looked like a larger and even hotter and drier version of Mencha. She checked the rope that ran from her rear saddle ring to the brown mare. The mare plodded after the gelding, bearing two sets of saddlebags, filled partly with stale travel bread, some daggers, a few hand tools and an awl—and two swords. Daffyd led another mare, a piebald one, similarly loaded.

  "Are you sure this wasn't the road you had in mind?" Anna asked for the second time, or maybe it was the third, glancing at the late-afternoon sun that hung over the dusty fields.

  "Lady Anna… I said I was sorry."

  "So am I." Anna wasn't quite sure why she found it hard to forgive Daffyd. Was it because she hadn't wanted to kill the bandits? Or because she'd been glad to be able to stop them before they hurt her or anyone else? They deserved it, a part of her mind said. But you were pleased, another part said. She took a deep breath. "Daffyd, I don't mean to be sharp with you, but… I've already done things here that I'm not proud of." Except you are, in a perverse way.