The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  Pain was a place. It was always dark, except when it was shot with bloodred lightning. There were stones, jagged of course, and rivers of fire. The ice on the mountaintops burned, and the sky rained ash. His soul turned inward and began to devour itself.

  Light crept slowly into the darkness. The pain and its maker receded. The ash turned to rain, and the rivers flowed cool and clean. She was there, all around him, pouring magic into him.

  She was beauty bare. A poet had sung that once when he was still a prince, and a remarkably young and callow one at that. He had thought it absurd at the time. Now he understood.

  He gathered the fragments of himself. Consciousness hovered just within reach. There was remarkably little pain. He remembered that he had eyes, and opened them.

  He did not recognize the room. The two on the rug by the stone hearth, he did know.

  She was naked. So was the man who lay with her, big and ruddy and wearing a great deal of barbaric gold. Kerrec did not need to see his face to recognize Euan Rohe.

  The broad freckled hand closed over Valeria’s breast. She arched into it just as she had done with Kerrec, and took Euan as she had taken him, with eagerness that he, fool that he was, had taken for love. If that was what it was, then she had plenty to share.

  Kerrec could not have said what he felt. Pain was not only a place, but a color as well. There was no name for that color. Eyes of the body could not see it, and words could not describe it.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, but there was no escaping it. He could not stop his ears, either, when her cry of satiation burst out a moment after Euan’s.

  They did not fall asleep like reasonable beings. They lay together, wrapped in one another, and murmured words that burned themselves into his brain.

  “Is this like the Dance?” Euan asked lazily, but with an edge that he could not quite hide.

  “A little, I suppose,” she said. “Those patterns rule all that is. These only rule us.”

  “You think so? Only us? Sometimes I feel as if we’re all the world.”

  She laughed as a woman will with her lover, soft and rich. “You’re a selfish creature. Are you sure you’ll be able to bear the sight of someone else on the throne?”

  “It’s only a throne,” he said.

  “Only—You don’t mean that!”

  “Really,” he said. “It’s only a chair. A ridiculously elaborate one, with a great deal of gold, but my rump would be just as happy on a bench in a tavern. I’ll take the gold and leave the chair for Gothard. He wants it.”

  “What do you want?” she asked. “Tell me the truth. What is this for you?”

  “War,” he answered. “War is life. War is a man’s destiny and a prince’s only purpose. War serves the One.”

  “You don’t want to rule nations? Be rich? Have all the women?”

  He snorted, then laughed. “Of course I want to be rich! I’ll take the nations, too, if they’re not too much trouble. As for the women, are you looking for rivals?”

  “Should I?”

  “Keep smiling at me like that and I’ll lay the empire at your feet.”

  “I don’t want the empire,” she said. “Only the Mountain.”

  “You know it’s yours.”

  “After I break the Dance,” she said. “After I shift it to the path your people want.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “I’d be a fool not to be.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I know I should be. But looking at you, feeling and smelling you, I can’t be afraid of anything in the world.”

  “Flatterer,” she said, but she was smiling. Kerrec could hear it in her voice. He heard the rest of what they did, too, with remarkable vigor on Euan’s part, considering how recently he had finished the first round.

  The world was splintering again, falling into shards. Kerrec made no move to stop it. His name and self were slipping away. He let them go. All that was left was a memory of her face, with a gust of grief and the twisting of hate. Enemy, traitor. He would, he must, destroy her.

  Kerrec had gone inside himself. He was healing, Valeria told herself with more hope than certainty. He was alive and breathing, and his color was better. She had to hope that the rest would come in time.

  It was just as well, considering what she had been doing while he slept in the same room. Guilt was a late bloom but a strong one. She had done it for him. As long as Euan was obsessed with her body, he would not think too hard about why she cared so much for another man’s life.

  Euan had arranged an escort as he had promised. They were waiting outside the lodge in the morning mist, which fell almost as heavy as rain. The world was bathed in a dim grey light. All but the closest trees were invisible, hidden in fog.

  Most of the escort were barbarians, but the guards who drove the cart and who rode closest to it were men from Aurelia. Valeria wondered if they knew what Kerrec had been before he was a rider. She supposed they did. Guards knew everything.

  She had to hope they could be trusted. She set a wishing on Kerrec even so, a Word of ward and guard. It was not much, but it might wake him if his guards turned on him, and help him escape.

  She could not kiss him. The guards were watching, and so was Euan. She had to settle for tucking the blanket around him and smoothing his hair back from his forehead. The first line of guards was already in motion.

  She stepped back as the driver clucked to the mules. Euan’s arm settled around her shoulders. She gritted her teeth and let it stay. He was claiming her. For the sake of the game, she had to let him.

  He could not keep her from standing on the step long after the last horseman had vanished into the fog. When she finally turned, he claimed his arm back again. “Mestre Olivet said for you to come when you were ready,” he said.

  “So you’re Olivet’s errand boy now?”

  Valeria bit her tongue, but Euan was too delighted with himself to be annoyed. “It amuses me,” he said. “We can amuse ourselves for a while, if you’d rather.”

  She sighed. “No. Best do my duty.”

  Was he disappointed? It was hard to say. She did not know him at all, when she came down to it. His body, yes—she knew every fingerbreadth of that. Of his mind she knew only what he chose to show.

  “Patterns can be made,” Mestre Olivet said, “but also destroyed. Wherever there is light, there is darkness.”

  Valeria suppressed a yawn. She had been listening to hours of platitudes interspersed with snippets from this book or that. So far she had seen no pattern in it. Between the drone of his voice and the whisper of rain that had begun to fall, she was half-asleep.

  Then he said, “This is the Book of the Unmaking.”

  She started awake. He was holding a scroll in a leather case, gingerly, as if the thing inside could strike like a snake.

  She had heard of the Book of the Unmaking. It was a rumor among riders and rider-candidates, and a half-heard story in the gatherings of wise-women to which her mother had taken her now and then. Most people said it did not exist, or if it had, it had been destroyed long ago.

  It negated what the stallions were. It unmade what they made. It broke the patterns and scattered them. Its spells, spoken in sequence by mages of great power, could unravel the fabric of the world.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “That it can—”

  “It’s safe enough,” Olivet said, “if one is careful—as with all magic.”

  “This more than most,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Its reputation is more myth than fact. There is danger in it, I won’t deny it, and certain sequences of spells are best not spoken together, but that can be said of any great grimoire.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  She held her breath, but he was always delighted to talk about himself. He sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his middle, settling in for a long and pleasant reminiscence. “I was often in the Master’s library in the citadel, reading the old masters and rediscovering arts that had
been put aside or forgotten. Even then I was evolving my own art. One evening as I delved into a deep corner full of books that had not been touched in years out of count—with the dust and cobwebs to prove it—I came across a box that looked as if it had not been opened since the library was built.”

  He sighed. “I still remember the dust on it, how thick it was. The lock was strong, but the spells of warding on it had worn thin. It was not the simplest task in the world to break the spells or the lock. Still, I prevailed. I found this.”

  Valeria stared at the scroll on the table between them. It was only a roll of old parchment. Olivet was clearly unperturbed. There was no reason for chills to crawl down her spine.

  But then, she thought, he had lost the stallion magic. He was still a mage, but the great magics and the beautiful discipline were gone. His power was strong, but it was hollow.

  This thing had done that to him. It had drained away the heart of his power.

  He seemed unaware of the loss. He unbound the cords and unrolled the scroll as if it had been an ordinary book. “This is the key,” he said, spreading his hands across a closely written page.

  The letters swarmed like insects. Valeria almost could have sworn that they crawled up over his fingers before slipping down again to the yellowed page.

  Was that page parchment? Or was it human skin?

  She made herself listen to him. “This is the key,” he said again. “Here I found my true art and native calling. I discovered that every power needs its opposite. For powers of light there must be powers of dark. For magic of the Word, silence. For the stallions’ magic, this.”

  “Unmaking,” Valeria said.

  He nodded. “What is made must be unmade. Otherwise, everything heaps on itself, higher and higher, deeper and deeper, until it comes crashing down. That’s the purpose of death—to make way for the generations that come after. If none of us ever died, the earth would fill with creatures until it could hold no more.”

  “Then you’re more than a simple rival to the Mountain,” she said. “You’re the antidote. The natural enemy.”

  Olivet shrugged, spreading his hands. “That is one way of seeing it. I see my place as necessary—as a counterbalance.”

  “But,” she said, “you have nothing to balance the stallions.”

  “I have this,” he said, caressing the page as she had never seen him caress a horse. “There is so much beauty here, so many wonders. None of my riders has the power to perceive them. But you…” His eyes on her were hungry. “You were sent. You are the heir of the Unmaking.”

  It was all she could do to keep her face expressionless. Her belly was a tight and painful knot. Her throat hurt.

  “See,” he said, unrolling the scroll to a column that was marked with a crimson ribbon. “A simple spell. It balances patterns, then undoes them so that they can be made again. Do you see the beauty in it? Do you see the elegance? It has no need for a god in the body of a horse. This is pure simplicity, magic stripped of all pretension.”

  She looked down at the column of words. They were in old Aurelian, very archaic. She could barely read them. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, they shifted themselves into forms that she knew.

  Her eyes were bound, compelled. She had to read the spell. It slithered into her mind and coiled there.

  She had time, just, to raise wards around it and wall it in. Even so, in passing it touched the edges of the patterns she had been building in her time on the Mountain. It was all she could do to keep them from unraveling.

  Beauty? she thought. Elegance? This was deep and subtle evil.

  Mestre Olivet seemed unaware that anything had happened. His power was riddled with gaps. As strong as it still was, it must have been remarkable before he lost the greater part of it.

  “They caught you, didn’t they?” she said before she could stop herself. “After you’d worked a few of these spells, your magic started to change. You couldn’t control the stallions any longer. Yes?”

  He stiffened. She braced for a storm of anger, but he had enough discipline left to keep it from bursting out. “I no longer needed the stallions. My art had gone beyond them. As yours will—after you have manipulated the Dance. Then the Dance itself may be unmade.”

  “If you are going to teach me to control the Dance,” she said, “then I can’t be near this book again until after. I’m not the master you were when you found it. I don’t have your protections. It will take the powers I need before I have a chance to use them.”

  She held her breath and prayed he could not see how badly that single spell had frightened her. Even to save Kerrec’s life, she could not subject herself to more of it.

  To her enormous relief, he nodded. “Yes. Yes, I see. Your strength is so great, your talent so overwhelming, I have difficulty remembering how young you still are.” He rolled up the scroll and fastened the bindings and slipped it into its case.

  Then finally she could breathe. He continued to stroke the scroll’s case while he went on. “When the Dance is unmade, you’ll have no more to fear. This power is meant for you as it was for me. Once you let go of the Mountain’s spell, you’ll see its wonders. But first, yes, continue in the old enfeebled way. Only by making can we unmake.”

  “And only by unmaking can we make,” she said.

  He smiled, as pleased with that bit of blatant manipulation as she had hoped he would be. “You are a very wise child,” he said. “Now then. First, the laws of making. Your rider never taught them to you? No? Well. In my day we learned them as soon as we were tested. Listen now, and listen well.”

  She listened, and she held her tongue. She felt the spell of Unmaking inside her, coiled within the wards, waiting for a moment of weakness. Please the gods and the powers of the Mountain, these arts that Mestre Olivet taught her so hastily—if they were true arts and not ruined as the rest of his power was—would not only keep the Unmaking at bay, but would destroy it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The sun moved in the sky. The moon rose and set. The sun came back again.

  The one without a name lay in fitful darkness, rocking and swaying. His body was pain. His spirit was emptiness. He slid in and out of a formless dream.

  The rocking and rattling stopped. Voices babbled, rising to a crescendo and then fading. Hoofbeats receded into the distance. There was a moment of silence.

  White light blazed upon him. Two white gods loomed above him. Both of them together were more than his maimed soul could bear. He hid in blankets to escape them.

  The young one, shadowed with dapples, plucked the blankets from him and tossed them aside. The elder, pure white and massive in his prime, nudged and coaxed and bullied him out of the wagon and onto stumbling feet. He reeled. Warm solidity held him up. He clung to the heavy white neck.

  The elder god breathed on him. The pain retreated. His mind was a little clearer. The splinters of his consciousness began to come together.

  He struck them apart with fierce repulsion. He did not want to remember. He did not want to have a name again, to have a memory, to know pain.

  He looked into the young one’s dark and liquid eye. A face was in it, a woman, young, beautiful—enemy. Traitor. Destroyer. He must find—he must kill—He flung himself toward that hated image.

  The elder stallion shouldered him aside. He stumbled and fell, and lay gasping on the stony ground. The surge of rage was gone, leaving him cold and sick.

  He could feel the stallions standing above him. He braced for the shattering blows of hooves, but a peremptory nose urged him to his feet again. It was the elder once more, the white one, whose name he could almost recall.

  The young one snorted explosively and shook his long moon-colored mane. He spun and showed them both his heels, bolting into the glare of sunlight.

  The elder stallion sighed. The man whose name was gone wound fingers in his mane and pulled himself onto the broad white back. Once there, his whole body relaxed. It did not matter where he went or wha
t became of him. This was where he belonged. This was home.

  The white stallion turned and walked carefully away from the broken wagon. Once he was sure that the man was secure on his back, he gathered his compact sturdy body and sprang into flight.

  He was much faster than he looked, and his paces were smooth. The man clung to his mane and let himself be carried wherever the white god pleased.

  The emperor’s heir had been uneasy since before the caravan came from the Mountain. No one else, even the Augurs and the soothsayers, seemed to see the vision that refused to let her be. Over and over she saw a pattern disrupted and a Dance turned to confusion.

  The riders had gone into seclusion on arrival, and their guards and servants had disappeared with them into a house near the palace that had last been opened a hundred years ago. The imperial retainers who had cleaned and prepared it had returned to their more usual duties. No one from outside the Mountain would approach the riders between the quarter moon and the new, until the Dance was over. Their solitude was sacred, and essential to their magic.

  Briana was standing above the gate when they rode in. She looked for her brother, but he was not there. She recognized the rest of the First Riders, and lesser riders behind them, fifteen in all. Of the one whose name now was Kerrec, there was no sign.

  Fifteen riders, fifteen white stallions. There should have been sixteen. Kerrec should have been there.

  She could hardly blame him if he had refused to come. Still, she was disappointed. She had thought better of him. No matter what was between him and their father, he should have been here for this. He was the strongest of the First Riders, even if he was the youngest. The Dance would not go well without him. If her foresight was true, it would go very badly, and bring disaster to the empire.

  If he was that spiteful, then she had no use for him.

  She had worked herself into a decent temper by the second day after the caravan had come. Her servants were walking softly, and her chamberlain had diverted all the embassies and petitions that required both tact and patience. She would have his head for that, but not immediately. First she was going to strangle her brother.