The Great Rain had caused Turmishan crops to fail and produced privation around the Inner Sea. Thus, it had at first astonished Umara to hear that the Chosen’s solution to the famine involved bringing down even more of it.
But Stedd was certain that, contrary to appearances, the rain was neither a force of pure destruction nor a weapon forged by Umberlee to impose her creed on the region. It was how one part of the world was mending the damage inflicted by the Spellplague.
And if the Great Rain was fundamentally a kind of healing, then master healers should be able to nudge it to work faster and finish restoring the natural order in Turmish. With luck, that truly would raise the Emerald Enclave’s magic to its former potency, and then the druids would be strong enough to undertake another great work.
That was the plan, anyway. Lying on her side in a lean- to with the torrential rain blinding and deafening her, Umara couldn’t judge how well it was working. “I’m going outside,” she shouted.
“What a bad idea,” Anton replied. But when she crawled out, he followed.
The rain pummeled her, stinging her nose, cheeks, and chin. She tugged her hood farther down and looked around.
Standing in the open, she could see and hear better, albeit only somewhat. The patterns of light on the ground had stopped expanding, presumably because they were complete. Reduced to a vague silhouette by the downpour, Shadowmoon still danced, and at least some of the other celebrants were still intoning their incantations; a trace of their voices whispered through the rattle of the rain.
Umara drew breath to yell, then thought better of it. She offered Anton her hand, and he smiled and took it. She led him toward the drop-off.
As they made their way, the sky repeatedly flashed white, and booms and crashes shook the tableland. Umara realized the clouds were producing some of the most prodigious thunderbolts she’d ever seen. But they didn’t make her flinch, not after the supreme violence of the initial blast. They simply felt like one detail of a still greater power at work on every side.
Unfortunately, even when she reached the spot where the ground fell away, she still couldn’t tell if that power was doing what the Chosen intended it to. Once again, the rain obscured too much. She could make out some of the nearer peaks composing the Elder Spires, but that was all.
“Seven black stars,” she growled in annoyance, and could barely even hear herself. But then the pounding of the rain abated, if not the roar. Surprised, she looked around and found one of the treants looming over her and Anton. The leafy branches that spread out above the creature’s face blocked some of the downpour.
She and Anton weren’t the only folk to whom the tree man was providing a sort of shelter. Several of the winged sprites perched in its lower branches.
“Thank you!” Umara bellowed.
The treant smiled, its mouth bending slowly. It extended a huge, bark-covered hand.
Umara hesitated, then took hold of a bark-covered fingertip. Anton gripped another.
The wizard wondered how long a polite treant handclasp was supposed to last. Then images surged into her mind.
Her immediate impulse was to defend against psychic intrusion, to snatch her hand back from the treant’s and sear the creature with a burst of fire while she was at it. It was the prudent way to react when anybody sought to touch one’s mind uninvited, and besides, the contact reminded her of Kymas riding in her head.
Yet another part of her—the part that had decided a measure of trust was possible even with outlander pirates, farm boy prophets, and druids—doubted the treant meant her harm. So, telling herself the contact was neither an attack nor an intentional violation, she focused on the visions and perceived them clearly.
When she did, she realized that either by virtue of its participation in the ritual or simply because of some inherent bond with the land, the treant could see farther than she could. In fact, it discerned what the rain was doing across the length and breadth of Turmish, and it wanted to share that knowledge.
The storm fed streaming floodwater that gnawed at the base of the peninsula that was home to the House of Silvanus and Sapra. Already eroded by months of rain, soil and even bedrock crumbled, falling away to form a gigantic ditch. Scattered steadings and hamlets slid and tumbled into the gulf. Umara hoped the folk who’d lived therein had abandoned them. If not, well, the druids had sent messengers to warn them.
Plainly, even after a year of torrential storms and even given the climactic fury of the current one, the collapse was occurring with impossible speed. But as the Chosen had realized, the Great Rain was in its essence a transcendent mystical force, not a mundane one, and apparently, it could do impossible things.
When the channel across the peninsula opened, the sea came rushing in to fill it. Smiling, Umara could only assume that even Umberlee was powerless to stop it, for the Queen of the Depths surely wouldn’t approve of the results.
Before the Spellplague, the Emerald Enclave had ruled a holy island called Ilighôn as its particular domain. With the straits reopened, Ilighôn was reborn.
The reshaping of land and sea brought a rush of spiritual power. Green light rippled and flickered in the sacred pool known as Springbrook Shallows. Treants laughed and danced with slow, swaying steps in the meeting place they called Archentree.
Then Umara’s benefactor looked farther afield. Once again, the sea was advancing, but this time, it wasn’t racing down a newly created channel. It was rolling over a long expanse of shore and drawing ever closer to a gray stone city.
“That’s Alaghôn!” Anton shouted. “The capital! Before the Spellplague made the waters recede, it was a great port. Now, it can be again.”
That’s assuming the water knows when to stop, Umara thought. But in truth, she expected that it would.
The treant shifted its clairvoyant gaze. Now Umara beheld patches of plagueland in the south. Pounding down, the rain extinguished Blue Fire as easily as it could have doused ordinary flame.
Then the visions faded, and the wizard found herself wholly in her own body and limited to her own perceptions once more. She was clutching the treant’s finger and Anton’s callused hand tightly, and the reaver was squeezing back. For some reason, she found herself reluctant to let go of him.
She did, though. The rain wasn’t falling nearly as hard as before, and the lightning and thunder had abated. She and Anton no longer had any reason to cling together like timid children.
All around her, the druids and their allies had an exuberant look; despite their exertions and the stinging drenching they’d just endured, they experienced the same exhilaration as the enormous dancers in Archentree.
Grinning, Ashenford struck chord after chord from his harp. Shinthala wore a kind of satisfied sneer, like the magic just concluded was an adversary she’d wrestled into submission. A centaur galloped, his hooves throwing up mud, and the sprites that had sheltered in the foliage of Umara’s treant friend flew into the air and whirled around and around one another.
But Stedd made a little gasping sound that almost sounded like a sob.
Anton and Umara both pivoted to the boy. His golden hair dripping, Stedd winced and held up a trembling hand to signal that he was all right.
The adults hurried over to him anyway. “What’s wrong?” Anton asked.
Stedd shook his head. He looked unhealthy and spent, with discoloration like bruises under his bright blue eyes. “Nothing.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s just … There are three grown-up Chosen and all these other druids and creatures to draw down Silvanus’s power. There’s only me to draw Lathander’s. And this new … well of strength we just dug. It’s for them, not me. It doesn’t give me any extra power. But don’t worry. I can do what I need to.”
“I’m sure you can,” Anton said, “when you take up the work again tomorrow. The druids can stop for today and give you time to rest.”
“No, they can’t.” Stedd pointed to the glowing lines and symbols at his feet
. “The designs and the … things the designs tie together … won’t last until tomorrow. Lathander says that when folk start a big, complicated work of magic, they need to push through to the end.”
“That’s true,” Umara said, “but perhaps the others can finish without you.”
Stedd sighed. “You know that isn’t true.”
Umara and Anton exchanged worried looks.
The boy scowled up at the pirate. “You told me to concentrate on finishing Lathander’s business.”
Anton scowled. “Would it sway you if I took it back? No, plainly not, stubborn brat that you are. Do what you have to, then. But be careful.”
“All right, everyone!” Shadowmoon called from her station to the west of everyone else. “Prepare yourselves. We have to press on.”
Umara squeezed Stedd’s shoulder. Then she and Anton moved back to stand with the treant.
The ritual resumed in the same incremental fashion in which it had begun. The Chosen at the cardinal points started conjuring in their various fashions. Stedd looked to the eastern horizon, prayed, and a golden glow lit his body from within. Shinthala murmured words that made the toes of her bare feet lengthen, burrow into the earth, and root her in place. Shadowmoon danced, and Ashenford harped. And gradually, over the course of the several breaths, the rest of the celebrants joined in.
Umara felt the intricate design on the ground pour out the power it had amassed. Or perhaps the luminous figure could more accurately be described as a lens focusing an ongoing torrent of spiritual energy rising from the Morninglord, the Treefather, and their worshipers. She suspected both descriptions were true in their way, and neither was sufficient.
However the magic functioned, she and her companions were about to find out if it was equal to the colossal task before it. The treant offered its hand, and she took hold of a fingertip as she had before.
The first vision showed her the forest called Mielikki’s Garden. The conjoined powers flowing outward from the Elder Spires rose through the trunks of the oaks. Branches sprouted acorns in a matter of moments, and hungry squirrels came bounding shortly thereafter.
Similar visions followed. Silvanus was the Forest Father, and whatever the celebrants had intended, the magic quickened the wild places first. Fortunately, plenty remained to revitalize plowed fields and orchards as well. Barley and beans sprouted and grew tall in fenced squares of mud and weed that peasants had abandoned in despair. Blossoms burst forth from apple and cherry trees, then fell in blizzards of petals as fruit supplanted them.
Umara sensed that Stedd had been correct: The other Chosen couldn’t have brought forth this bounty without him. The druids could summon the vitality and fertility Silvanus embodied. They could even direct it to farmlands that under normal circumstances were the province of Chauntea the Earthmother. But to flourish, the wheat and rye, the carrots and peas, the peaches and strawberries also needed an infusion of the sunlight the cloud cover had so long denied them.
Fingers closed around Umara’s wrist and pulled her hand away from the treant’s. “Look!” Anton said.
She did and caught her breath. Stedd was on fire!
No, she realized an instant later, he wasn’t. But the radiance shining from his body had brightened from a dawn-like glow to a blaze. Squinting, she could barely make out the human form inside the light or even stand to look at it directly.
“Is that the way it should be?” Anton asked.
For the most part, Umara still didn’t comprehend the inner workings of the ritual. But she feared she could guess the answer to the pirate’s question. “He may be channeling more power than he can handle.”
“Then this ends.” Anton started forward.
Umara caught him by the forearm. “You can’t,” she said.
“I touched the tree man’s hand again, too. I saw there are already new crops in the fields.”
“Still, if you interrupt the ritual, the change may not stick. And Stedd wouldn’t want that, no matter what.”
“To the Hells with what he’d want,” Anton answered. But he didn’t try to pull away.
The ritual seemed to stretch on endlessly. Umara supposed that was because her wonder and curiosity had given way to apprehension.
Finally, Shadowmoon shouted, “It’s done!”
The celebrants stopped chanting, singing, drawing shrill harmonies from beating transparent wings, or making any other sort of sound. The enormous glowing design on the ground vanished.
Stedd’s corona winked out at the same moment. Its departure left his body looking utterly emaciated, as though the magic had melted every ounce of fat and most of the muscle, too. He turned to Anton and Umara, tried to smile, and then pitched forward onto his face.
Evendur Highcastle sensed that elsewhere the rain had fallen with exceptional fury for part of the day and then subsided to what, in these times of perpetual rain, was normal. But on Pirate Isle, the storm had changed in certain respects but raged on even more violently than before.
Thunder boomed, and lightning repeatedly struck the highlands above Immurk’s Hold. Avalanches spilled down the mountainsides, and wildfires burned. Surveying the scene from the battlements atop Umberlee’s temple, his vestments flapping around his spongy flesh, Evendur speculated that it was the wind that kept the fires going in defiance of the rain. The same screaming gale burled huge waves at the island to maul and toss ships at anchor, crash against the rocks, and fling spray high into the air. It tore the thatched roofs off huts and taverns or knocked them down entirely and tumbled the wreckage away.
The wind was also a voice, though Evendur suspected he was the only one who understood it. It had called him forth to stand in the tempest and attend his deity.
Umberlee kept him waiting long enough to watch a galley pound itself and the dock to which it was moored to pieces, and the handsome old house called Teldar’s Rest slowly list until it toppled. Then, finally, she deigned to appear to him, although he felt her anger like a hammer blow before he actually recognized her countenance for what it was.
Her face was the sea. The entire sea, or at last as much of it as he could see from his perch. Two faraway lighter patches were her glaring eyes, while the breakers defined her snarling mouth. Somehow, her features maintained their fundamental constancy even though the water was in constant storm-tossed upheaval.
The instincts of a Chosen told Evendur the Queen of the Depths came to him in this guise because no lesser form could contain or express her wrath. An instant later, the sheer force of that anger shattered the walkway under his feet and much of the temple facade beneath it. He and countless shards of blue-green stone fell down the cliff face toward the waves below. He slammed into an outcropping, bounced off, and smashed down partly on and partly off a boulder protruding from the foaming surf.
“I warned you,” she told him. Louder now, deafening, her voice was both the roar of the wind and the hiss of the waves, and it held gloating laughter as well as rage. Perhaps he should have expected as much. She was the drowner of sailors and the breaker of ships, and every opportunity to torment and destroy excited her.
Instinct prompted him to try to drag himself all the way up onto the rock. He couldn’t. He was still aware and undead but as incapable of movement as any ordinary corpse.
The alternating push and suck of the waves shifted his center of gravity and tipped more of his body into the water, immersing his legs up past the knees. He kept slipping a bit at a time until he slid wholly into the water.
The waves bumped him into the waving seaweed on the side of the boulder. Then a riptide seized him and dragged him away from shore.
He wondered what Umberlee had in mind. She could feed him to sea creatures willing to eat carrion, or scrape him through corral reefs and cut and pull him apart a bit at a time. But he suspected she meant to dump him back where she’d found his drowned corpse to deliver a more protracted initial torment. Whatever punishment she intended, it could only be because she’d decided he’d fa
iled her yet again.
Previously, Evendur had deemed it wise to remain mute in the face of her rage. But he sensed that tactic would no longer serve. His only hope was to convince her he could still achieve her ends.
But how? He sensed his paralysis was no impediment. Linked to him as she was, she could still hear his voice if she condescended to do so. But what was he to say? He struggled to frame some sort of argument, and finally, the words came to him.
“Fine!” he snarled. “Cast me away! Surrender!”
He felt the pressure of the rip current diminish for a moment, as though his insolence had startled her. Then it swept him onward.
“I know what your holy books say,” he continued. “The mighty Queen of the Depths never surrenders. But maybe it isn’t true. Because I’m still your champion, and if you take me out of the contest now, you’re abandoning the Inner Sea to Lathander.”
The racing current tumbled him.
“Leave me in place,” he pleaded, “and I can still win! I’ll bring together every iota of the church’s might into a great armada and lead it against the boy and any who dare to stand with him. Whatever miracle he’s worked, I’ll unmake it. Whatever hopes his magic and preaching have raised, I’ll dash them. And when I’ve done all that, and drowned him in your name, no one will doubt your supremacy any longer!”
Suddenly—and rather to Evendur’s surprise—the riptide ebbed away to nothing. He felt something in his upper back grinding together, and strength surged back into his hulking frame.
“Kill everyone,” Umberlee hissed. “Everyone but those who grovel before me. Turn the green sea red if that is what it takes.”
Then the crushing sense of divine presence disappeared.
Evendur kicked upward until his head broke the surface. The howling, hammering storm was already subsiding into just another gray, rainy day. The harbor was half a mile away, an inconsequential distance for a fellow who could swim like a shark.
Anton put his hand on Stedd’s brow. That morning, it had been cold. Now, it was hot. The temperature swung back and forth for some reason the druids had failed to explain in terms a pirate could understand.
The Reaver Page 28
