The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  “Does it swallow them? Destroy them?”

  “In time,” he answered, “it swallows all that is.” He beckoned to her. “Come, sit down. There is much to learn, and very little time.”

  Valeria sat gingerly across from him, although he had pointed to the stool beside him. The book he drew out of the clutter was all too familiar. She hoped he did not see how she shuddered. She was beginning to regret eating as much breakfast as she had.

  She had to carry on. Now more than ever, Olivet could not suspect that she was not his ally but his enemy. She let him turn the book toward her and take up a pointer and point to a passage written in letters that burned themselves inside her eyelids.

  “This is the second spell of Unmaking,” he said. “There are six, but there is no time to learn them all. Even I have only come to the sixth through years of study. But you with your great magic will need no more. The Dance is in you, set in your bones.”

  Her hands were cold. She fought to keep them from shaking. Her protections, even doubled and trebled, strained before the power of the spell. The first spell had laired in her mind. This took aim at her heart.

  Sabata, she prayed. Oh, gods, Sabata.

  He was there as always with the rest, the circle of the white gods. Behind them she saw others, powers as much greater than they as they were greater than mortal horses. At first she thought they were Great Ones, but she saw Sabata and Petra in the more familiar circle. Then she met a pair of dark eyes in a lone dark head, and realized that these were the Ladies.

  She could not move in the body. Mestre Olivet was watching. In spirit she bowed low in respect and deepening awe.

  The Lady whom she had known touched her with a sting of impatience. Awe was for lesser powers, fools who needed the worship of mortals to feed their pride. The Ladies were beyond such things.

  Valeria could not help it. She was mortal, as she had been reminded all too often of late. Awe was the price the Ladies paid for revealing themselves.

  The dark Lady found that amusing. She had no wisdom to offer, and no advice. She was beyond that, too. But she was there, and her sisters and aunts and grandmothers with her, a white wall against the spells of Unmaking.

  They were not going to tell Valeria what to do, still less how to do it. That was for her to discover.

  “And if I fail?” she asked them.

  They did not answer.

  This could drive a person mad, Valeria thought. Small wonder the Ladies never revealed themselves to the riders. Men wanted everything set in words, the simpler the better.

  There were no words for what the Ladies were. Valeria bathed for a while in their brilliance. It was almost painful to draw away from it, open her eyes to the mortal world, and listen to Mestre Olivet’s spew of words. How like a man to drown even the Unmaking in them, although it was almost as far beyond words as the Ladies themselves.

  Valeria was further than ever from understanding why the gods were allowing this thing. She could think of nothing better to do than pretend to listen, try not to let the words from the book crawl into her brain, and hope this day would end soon.

  When Mestre Olivet finally let her go, Valeria was surprised to discover that it was still daylight. As far as she could tell through the thick clouds, it was barely past noon. She felt as if she had been shut in with the Unmaking from dawn to dark.

  Olivet had given her no orders, which left her free to go back to her room and sleep. Instead she went to find Sabata.

  He was still locked in his stable, pacing the floor and occasionally biting at the walls. She opened the door so that he could come and go as he pleased.

  She had expected him to run until he could not run any more, but he was in an oddly quiet mood now his prison walls were open. He walked a little distance from the door, lowered his head and set to work cropping grass as if he had not stood in front of a manger full of excellent hay since he arrived the night before. She folded her feet under her and sat against the wall, watching him. There was a distinct, damp chill in the air, which made her shiver lightly, but she would rather be here than shut in a room that reeked of stone magic.

  Gothard found her there. She regarded him in unconcealed surprise. It was far below his dignity to run his own errands, let alone seek out her thoroughly unaristocratic company.

  He was none too pleased with it, either, from the way he glared down his nose at her. It was an expression she had seen on Kerrec’s face often enough. Odd, she thought, that he had never directed it at her. However arrogant Kerrec was by nature, not once, no matter how infuriating he was, had he made her feel that she was beneath him.

  She missed him suddenly, with a sensation as sharp as pain. Gods be thanked he was not here—he must be safe on the Mountain by now. But she could not stop herself from wishing it were Kerrec standing over her and not his brother.

  Gothard squinted at her. “Gods,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” He said it as if it were her fault that he had never noticed it before. “I suppose the riders hold that against you, too.”

  “I think it’s quite sufficient that I’m female,” she said.

  “They say too many hours in the saddle can make a man like a eunuch,” said Gothard. “Their actions toward you do seem to bear it out.”

  Valeria held her tongue. She could testify that in one rider’s case at least, it was certainly not so. But she was not about to say that to this man.

  He took no notice of her silence. He turned to stare at Sabata, who was doing nothing of interest. Abruptly he said, “If you’re going to ride him in the Dance, you had better do something to prepare him.”

  “Who said I’m riding him in the Dance?”

  “How can you not? To change the Dance, we need a stallion, and the stallion has to have a rider. This is the stallion we have. I don’t expect Olivet to do it. The old man’s past it.”

  “Sabata is too young,” she said. “I can’t—”

  “He’s broken to ride—I’ve seen you on him. You’ll ride him every day between now and the Dance. He only has to carry you for a short time, but he’d better be fit to do it.”

  “Six days aren’t going to—” Valeria began.

  “They’ll have to,” said Gothard. “He needs a saddle, I suppose. There must be a bridle in this place somewhere.”

  “I’m not going to ride him,” Valeria said.

  “I think you are,” he said. “I’ll send one of the grooms. He’ll help you to get what you need.”

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  Gothard flung up his hands. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone so far on Olivet’s road that you can’t ride, either.”

  “I’m not that far gone,” Valeria said grimly.

  “Good. I’ll send the groom. Do it for the horse if not for me.”

  “I don’t need a groom,” she said. “I don’t need a saddle. I’ll ride him without.”

  Gothard eyed her narrowly. She glowered back. “Humor me,” he said.

  “I already am.”

  He hissed, but he could not fail to see that he had won. She pushed herself to her feet and approached Sabata. She was aware of Gothard’s eyes on her back, but he no longer mattered.

  Sabata raised his head as she laid her hand on his shoulder. He was calm, with the sweet taste of grass in his mouth and the wind ruffling his mane. “I hate to admit it,” she said to him, “but he is right.”

  Sabata sighed and shook himself from nose to tail. Of course the man was right, his manner said. Was she going to dally another three months or was she going to do something about it?

  There was only one answer to that. She took her time as Kerrec had taught her, sending Sabata out on a circle and putting him through his paces around her.

  His muscles warmed. His heart beat more strongly, and his breath came deep and steady. He danced a little for the joy of wearing this body in this age of the world.

  He was beautiful and he knew it, and he had no fear of what was coming. It would be as it
would be.

  He paused in his exercises, then turned and looked over his shoulder, inviting her to mount.

  She did not ride long, nor did she ask him for the movements of the Dance. It was enough that he carried her.

  Gothard by then had grown bored and wandered off. He was not a horseman. His only care for Sabata was that he be fit to turn the Dance in Gothard’s favor.

  Valeria did not honestly know what Sabata would do. That the stallions would submit themselves to the will of their riders, she knew. She had seen it. But Sabata did not practice submission.

  She slid from his back and buried her face in his mane. He swiveled his neck about and blew on her hair. He was not afraid, nor should she be. Even if she died, she would be with him. He would keep her spirit safe, whatever became of her body.

  That was not as comforting as he meant it to be. She hugged him until he shook his head in protest. “I’d prefer to stay in the body,” she said.

  In some ways he was remarkably like his mother. He did not answer that, but wandered off in search of the sweetest patch of grass.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Briana had a great deal of thinking to do before she went to her father. She had hoped to do it in solitude, but two petitioners had got as far as her anteroom.

  If Demetria had been at her usual post, even the Chief of the College of Augurs and the First Lord of the Imperial Council would not have passed that door. But Demetria was guarding the emperor. Her third in command, loyal guardsman though he was, had not been able to withstand the power of the two men’s titles.

  They rose and bowed when she came in. She inclined her head in return, suppressing the inward sigh. They were both her cousins in her mother’s line, but very different in personality and looks. The Chief Augur was a tall and slender man, very elegant, with a gentle manner and an ivory mask of a face. Duke Gallio had been a legionary commander in his youth, and he had the leathery look of the lifelong soldier, with scars enough to mark his valor.

  He was one of the strongest supporters of her father’s war. What the Chief Augur thought about it, no one knew. If she had asked, he would have answered as he always did, that it was not his place to offer opinions of that nature. He was a reader of signs and omens, a voice for the wind of heaven.

  There were preliminaries, a dance as graceful in its way as the Dance of the stallions, and with its own peculiar power. It smoothed raw edges and softened tension.

  She let it go on as long as her uninvited guests were willing to continue. It was part of the game. At last Duke Gallio conceded surrender and came to the point. “Lady, we know the emperor is in seclusion, but maybe you know his mind. It’s been a hundred years since the last Great Dance—since anyone raised the power that changes the future. How do we know that future will be anything we can live in?”

  “The emperor’s will binds the Dance,” said the Chief Augur. “It unfolds through him.”

  “And if the emperor is ill? What then? What happens to the Dance?”

  Briana heard this in deep alarm. She swallowed the first words that came into her head and made herself pause, calm down and then say, “The Dance will be safe. The riders will assure it if, gods forbid, the emperor is unable.”

  The Augur nodded. “The master of the riders is given the emperor’s mandate. If the emperor is unable to fulfill it, then he undertakes to do so.”

  That seemed to reassure Duke Gallio, at least for the moment. It did not comfort Briana as much as it might have. The Chief Augur could have put the First Lord’s fears to rest without forcing Briana to serve as a witness. “Reverend father,” she said, “is everything well?”

  “We are ready for the Dance,” he said, “all but the final preparations.”

  He had not answered her question. “That’s well,” she said. “But the rest?”

  He was unusually reluctant to answer. Finally, with a glance at Gallio, he drew a small scroll from his sleeve. She recognized the crimson cord that bound it and the seals that hung from it. This was the scroll of the omens, which was given to the emperor at each new moon. “This is somewhat irregular,” he said, “but in the circumstances, I think it best that you see what is written here.”

  Briana took the scroll with an odd shiver. That seal was for the emperor to break. She thought briefly of taking it to him, but the Augur himself could have done that. There must be a reason why he had brought it to her instead.

  She murmured a Word over the seal, to remove any curse that might attend her breaking it and to ward the contents of the scroll. The seal fell whole into her hand. The scroll unrolled itself.

  She could read an omen as clear as that. She bent to the scroll. It was closely written, much more so than others she had seen.

  Soon enough she saw what the Augur had wanted her to see. Here in Aurelia she had noticed few enough portents, unless the worsening weather after so long a spell of calm could be counted as such. But there was a widening pattern of signs and prodigies which, if she had drawn them on a map, formed a great circle all around the heart of the empire.

  Leviathans in the deep, storms that blew without warning and wrought utter destruction, darkness at noon and storms of fire at midnight, those were the most obvious. But to her eye, the numerous lesser oddities were more disturbing. A swarm of bees had overwhelmed a village near the eastern frontier, killed or driven out its inhabitants and transformed its headman’s house into a vast hive. In a town to the north, all the cats had departed, leaving the rats to rule unchallenged. Not too terribly far to the south, cows were calving out of season, giving birth to bizarre deformities—a startling number of which lived until the herdsmen put them out of their misery.

  There were dozens of such strange occurrences, and more of them every day. Only one place had none, and that was the Mountain. Everywhere else was plagued with portents.

  She did not have to be a horse mage to see the pattern. Ripples from the Dance could spread into the past as well as the future. The empire was in grave danger, and it all hinged on the day of the emperor’s festival.

  She rolled the scroll carefully and fastened its cords, using the time to find words that would not be misunderstood. Finally, when the omens were hidden again though not forgotten, she said, “Tell me why you brought this to me and not my father.”

  “The last portent,” the Augur said.

  She frowned. She had read so many. The last—she had barely skimmed it.

  “The lioness in the duke’s menagerie at Roviga,” the Augur said, “who gave birth to a black filly foal with a crescent moon on its brow. The pattern in the portents, the shape of things around it, points to you, highness. You are, somehow, a key.”

  Briana shuddered under her skin. This man’s gift was to read whole worlds in the passage of a shadow or the turn of a stallion’s hoof. Her face, even with all the training she had had, could not be terribly difficult for him to decipher.

  The opposite, unfortunately, was not true. Like all master mages, he was warded completely. She could read nothing but what he chose to show. She had known him since she was a child, but whether she could trust him with what she knew—she did not know.

  She decided to tell a part of the truth. Not the part that made her shiver, the part in which she was sure that the omen referred not to her but to the woman who had been Called. That, she found she wanted to keep to herself. If the Augur had not seen or foreseen it, then surely it was not meant for him to know.

  She told him the thing that was more immediate and probably lesser, although it was great enough in itself. “There has been an attack on the emperor,” she said. “The wound is minor, but the blade was poisoned with akasha. He will be alive and aware for the Dance, but he may be unable to influence it to the extent that he had hoped.”

  Duke Gallio’s breath hissed between his teeth. Briana made herself ignore him.

  The Chief Augur betrayed no more expression than before. “The emperor is not required to be a mage,” he said. “The Dance i
s a power outside of his, even as he expresses the will of the gods and of the empire. If the riders ride well and the white gods are well disposed, it will matter little whether he brings magic to the rite.”

  “But it will matter.”

  He shrugged slightly, a minute lift of one shoulder. “Are you asking whether your magic can turn the tide?”

  “Can it?”

  “That,” he said, “we do not know. As the heir you have great power in your own right. You are bound to the empire as your father is, although in lesser degree. Then of course there is the fact that you, like him, are a mage of rare potency. Whether your power will suffice for this, I cannot see.”

  “But it might? It’s possible?”

  “All things are possible,” Duke Gallio said in a burst of rare impatience. “A lioness can give birth to a horse foal, and Augurs can wax grave as to the meaning of it. The rest of us have less lofty and more practical concerns. Do you know who attacked your father?”

  She had been prepared for that. Again, she answered honestly. “We have reason to suspect that they were agents of the prince Marcellus.”

  She held her breath. This could be a very bad decision, or it could have gained a pair of allies. She might not know which until the Dance was over.

  “I see,” the Augur said with no more expression than before. Maybe he had known, or maybe she had made clear a pattern that he had already half understood. “The Dance will require Great Wards, then, and mages of stones to secure them. Guards as well, I think. My lord?”

  “I can put the emperor’s own on alert,” the First Lord said. He was not surprised at all, she noticed, and he had none of her father’s insistence that she prove her accusation. If anything, he seemed relieved. “It’s only sensible in any case.”

  “Please,” Briana said, although she risked insulting them both, “be circumspect. The fewer people who know the truth, the better.”

  “By all means,” the First Lord said. “Set your mind at ease, Highness. No one will know why we’re doing this, unless he can be bound to silence.”