by Rick Shelley
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Danger literally pressed against the valley of the Seven Towers from every side. The veil that isolated the valley was squeezing inward from every side, forcing the valley to contract toward nothingness. Racing outward in their minds, Silvas and Maria could see what was happening. The effect was most noticeable along the upper slopes of the hills that ringed in the Glade and its village, and in the passes where the roads crossed out of the valley. The land was crumpling up, slowly, but relentlessly. Trees were falling and being splintered, caught in new folds in the earth, ground up and buried as the land pressed inward. The ground shuddered and trembled in agony, shaking the entire valley.
So far, there was no visible damage in the village, in the center of the valley, or in the fields right around it. Even in the Seven Towers, the earthquake had not yet caused any gross damage, though the castle itself had started to tremble slightly.
"We don't have much time to stop this," Silvas said.
"The veil is no longer sufficient. They want to fully destroy this valley and everything in it," Maria replied.
Brief conversations did not waste time. While their mouths spoke, their minds worked at much greater speed, seeking alternatives and reaching outward to spread the alarm and to contact their counselors. Everyone had returned safely to their bodies following the truncated Council. The castle guard and the newly recruited mercenaries were already answering the call to arms.
Silvas and Maria did not bother to go down to their apartment to don the armor and weapons that were waiting for them there. They used more direct means to call it to them. A word clad them in armor, and brought their weapons to hand.
Josephus and Braf met Silvas and Maria at the base of the stairway outside the great hall. Both were geared for battle and reported the readiness of their men.
"The first thing we have to do is stop this contraction," Silvas said. "If we can't do that, it little matters who is behind it or what their next move might be. We'll go to the crossroads at the center of the valley."
"Stopping the contraction might take all of us who were within the Council pentagram," Josephus cautioned. "There is considerable force behind this."
Silvas's hesitation was scarcely noticeable even for senses honed to a perfect edge by imminent catastrophe. He nodded. "All of us," he said. "Braf, that means you'll have to leave the Seven Towers as well, for however long this takes."
"Aye, lord. I've already made arrangements."
Felix came down the stairs then, still fumbling to connect the last straps on his armor, and doing poorly. Josephus went to him and adjusted everything quickly, if roughly.
"What is it, lord?" Felix managed to stutter while Josephus was working.
"The battle is about to be joined, if we survive the collapsing of this valley," Silvas said. Forcefully, he projected the image of what was happening into Felix's mind. Call forth the power within you! he commanded. We must all fight now. It was a difficult task to set for a new apprentice, but there was no time for a more gentle way.
Felix's face paled. "I'll do what I may."
The five of them went out into the courtyard. Bosc was there with Bay and Camiss. Horses were also waiting for Josephus and Felix. Braf would run alongside them. He would not ride a horse, even for this urgent mission. The band of soldiers recruited in the Shining City was mounted, waiting to follow. Their duty was combat in the open. The walls of the Seven Towers would be defended by their traditional forces.
"Here, Bosc," Maria said after she had mounted Camiss. "You'll ride with me." She leaned to the side and stretched out a hand. When Bosc took it, she pulled him quickly up in front of her on Camiss.
There was no need for spoken commands. Anything that had to be communicated went from mind to mind. Silvas and Maria started toward the gate. Braf ran at Silvas's side. Josephus and Felix followed-Felix still awkward in the saddle. The hundred and more armed warriors from the land of the gods fell into two columns behind them. Even these soldiers could sense that something dire was happening, though few had the power to actually see the destruction taking place along the verge of the valley. Tonight we earn our way or die, was a common thought.
It still did not look like night. Only memory of the passage of time, and the turning of the watches in the castle, clearly informed anyone that it was night, a time when all but the sentries should be asleep. The colors in the sky looked somewhat darker, and more turbulent, but there was still considerable light. Angry clouds pressed closer together, bringing another torrent of lightning in primary and secondary colors, ranging from cloud to cloud. The lightning still did not attack the ground. The rainbow hues were also being compressed from the edges, giving the balance to the central colors.
When the riders reached the crossroads, Josephus deployed his soldiers in a wide circle, facing outward toward the danger. In the center of that circle, the rest got ready to combat the shrinking of their valley. Once more, Silvas drew a large pentagram in the intersection, using the blade of his sword rather than the quarterstaff he normally used for such constructions. Each line and angle was drawn perfectly, even at such speed that Silvas seemed to be running from point to point.
Once the pentagram was complete, the seven individuals of power took up the same positions they had taken in the Council pentagram-Silvas and Maria together in the center; Josephus, Bay, Felix, Braf, and Bosc in the points. For this work, Josephus was placed in the point that faced north, along the longer axis of the valley.
The first spells, to empower and defend this pentagram, were chanted quickly, but carefully. Silvas and Maria took the lead, and focused individually on each word of every stanza. Beyond that, their work took on a more hectic pace. They were not concerned with elegance, only with stopping the contraction of the valley as quickly as they could. Refinement could come later, if there was a later.
The first spells to counteract the collapse of the valley required a major application of power even for gods and demigods working in concert. For every spell that Silvas and his companions wove, there was an opposing spell. Someone was actively directing this assault.
Vital though it was to stop the contraction of the valley, Silvas could still spare some thought for his latest interview with the old man in the strange forest clearing. Even while Silvas sought spell after spell to push back against the forces outside the valley, one line of the old man's talk came to dominate his ruminations: "Look to your roots." At first, that remained a puzzle. And then, a glimmer.
My roots, my beginnings, my birth, Silvas thought.
For all the ages of his wizardry, Silvas had known nothing of his beginnings. His earliest memories had been of his arrival at the Glade, a seven-year-old boy come to serve as apprentice to Auroreus. Silvas's mind had been a blank slate, knowing nothing of his past but his name, and even that was quickly put aside for a new name. Only recently had Silvas learned that Auroreus had scoured all of time to find him, and a kaleidoscopic journey to that time had given him some hints. He had come from a mad future of buildings that put the palaces of the Shining City to shame, a future where people sped around at impossible speeds in enclosed metal carriages pulled by no animals. The pace of life in that milieu had appeared impossibly frantic, a caricature of some as-yet unimaginable reality.
But Silvas was no longer restricted to the mind of a wizard, conditioned by his teacher. There were no longer corners in his head that he could not explore. Looking now, Silvas saw the seven-year-old boy he had been when Auroreus found him, an orphan in a time and place that seemed impossibly strange. As soon as Silvas decided that the collapse of the valley had been slowed sufficiently, he was ready to chance the distraction that an excursion into his long-hidden childhood might bring.
He warned Maria through their direct link. Be ready to call me back instantly at need, he added, and he waited for her acknowledgment before he took the next step.
Silvas did not actually take a deep breath then, save in the body of his spirit. He st
ood within his mind and took a quick look around, as if he were seeking ambushers close at hand. Then he called on the memory of his one chaotic tour through the land and time of his birth, bringing it out of its recess the way he might call a scroll from its niche in his library.
He lived the memory again, with his younger self there looking through his eyes as guide.
The world raced past him/them. Boldly painted vehicles of metal and glass sped by much faster than galloping horses. Silvas doubted that even Bay could pace these vehicles. The buildings… Silvas craned his head back. Row after row of windows stretched up far into the sky, many hundreds of feet above him. The buildings sat next to each other, and across narrow lanes from each other, as far as he could see in either direction. He walked to the nearest intersection and saw that the array went on in the other directions as well. Skyscrapers, his youthful guide said. A few hundred feet away down one of those other roads, an elevated roadway crossed, and on that there was what appeared to be an endless stream of the strange and noisy vehicles. Some were much larger than the ones he saw on the surface roads right around him. Large, closed boxes attached to smaller vehicles, large boxes with rows of windows along the sides. He could see people inside all of the vehicles with windows. They seemed intent on whatever was directly in front of them, not looking at whatever, or whoever, might be on either side or behind them. Cars, trucks, buses, his younger self said, giving words to the images.
Not all of the people were in vehicles, though. Hundreds, thousands, of them hurried by on walkways-sidewalks-that paralleled the roads. They seemed not to see Silvas, which was not much of a surprise to him. His trip through this time was only in the spirit.
He turned to face the largest stream of pedestrians. They were dressed in a bewildering array of styles, all of which seemed alien to Silvas. Many of the men appeared to wear something similar to a uniform, trousers and coat of similar fabric, color, and design, over shirts that were white or some pastel shade, with colored cloths tied around their necks and hanging down their chests, visible in the V-notches of their jackets. The colors of the jackets and trousers were generally drab-blue, gray, brown, dark blue-but occasionally bright. Some of the women were dressed similarly, though perhaps a third of the women wore skirts instead of trousers.
Silvas stared closely at the faces. Everyone seemed intent on what was directly in front of them, as the people in the vehicles had. He saw intense concentration, and many frowns, but not a smile or laugh, not in hundreds of faces that rushed past without showing the slightest hint that they saw him.
Almost without realizing what he was doing, Silvas started walking against the flow of that pedestrian traffic. His presence did not impede any of the walkers, and they did not impede him. While he walked, the vista around him flickered, changing subtly. He had gone several dozen paces before he realized that the entire scene was changing with each flicker. He was seeing different futures, any one of which might be the one that actually came to pass. Anything you do could affect the future that will be, a voice within him said, and Silvas remembered a similar warning given to him on his other tour through this landscape: If you fail, it will not be better that you had never been born, it will be as if you had never been born. If he failed, the future in which he had been born might never come into existence… and then he would not have existed to fail.
Silvas's mind worried at that paradox without success. He stopped walking. A shed with one open side was close by, displaying-not books or scrolls, but papers with writing and pictures. Some were black and white, while others used a lot of colors. Newspapers and magazines, the boy who had become Silvas told him. Silvas stared, his eyes scanning, but he really was not registering what he saw. The language was different. It was English, but it was not the English he knew from the thirteenth century. The boy within pieced out some of the words, but not even he could instantly translate all of them. He had been new to reading when Auroreus snatched him from that world.
Bright covers. One with a bright red rim caught his eye, and the words so large that they almost seemed to scream at him: "GOD IS DEAD!"
That caption was quickly lost in a deluge of other words and pictures. The papers in the shed seemed to change with every flicker of the air around them. There were words that Silvas could not fathom immediately, although the words around them were common enough. Proper names, he thought, names of people and places. I should be able to puzzle them out if I put my mind to it. But there were always new words, and new sights, forcing themselves to his notice.
Then the shed disappeared. The people and their vehicles also vanished. The mighty towers were reduced to smoking rubble, or to rubble that did not smoke, or they simply ceased to exist, to be replaced by woodland, or by water that flowed high over Silvas's head as the potential futures strayed farther and farther from the norm that Silvas had first seen.
"Enough already!" he shouted when he was once more surrounded by dry land-and a cemetery that stretched as far as he could see in every direction. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rows of stone markers stood in regular ranks. There might have been a million people buried in that one field.
"Enough already!"
Silvas scarcely had a chance to realize that he was back in his mind, in his physical body, still weaving spells to hold back the collapsing dome over the valley of the Seven Towers when he heard another scream of alarm.
"Lord, they come!" It was Braf, shouting a warrior's alert. The real battle was finally at hand.
Silvas looked through his eyes and the excursion faded from his immediate thoughts. The enemy was indeed coming, on two levels. They were invading the valley of the Seven Towers, but they were also gathering in the land of the gods, and once more Silvas found himself needed on two separate but joined battlefields. The young boy disappeared from the consciousness of the wizard god. Silvas took a deep breath as he looked around and decided how to deploy the forces he had at his command.
But even while he struggled to meet the immediate challenge, there was a nagging thought in his mind. The answer was there, in what I saw. I saw enough to give me the clue. If only I had time to pull it all together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"It should be an hour until dawn," Silvas said in an offhand manner. But the continuing lack of true night in the valley meant that there would be no true dawn-at least not before the battle was won or lost.
"The enemy is almost at the barrier," Braf said, making sure that Silvas knew where the challenge lay.
"Yes, Braf, I know," Silvas replied. "Look toward the village."
Braf turned to look. Dozens of people-human, gurnetz, and esperia-had come out of their cottages, holding whatever implements they owned that might prove useful as weapons: hoes, pitchforks, axes, knives. These villagers would stand to in defense of their homes.
"Do we give them better weapons?" Maria asked.
"They'll use what they have better than they would use swords," Silvas said. "It will be up to our soldiery to make sure that they're not overmatched."
"How much time do we have?" Felix asked.
Silvas glanced in the spirit at the force approaching the barrier. "Some moments yet. We'll head east along the road to meet them." A more thorough scan showed that there was only this one force advancing on the valley. No enemies threatened the other sides. And there appeared to be no more than a token force waiting in the land of the gods to face off against Silvas. That force would not invade the valley. Silvas knew he would have to face them on their ground.
Silvas and Maria closed down the pentagram at the crossroads. Josephus rejoined the mercenaries. Silvas and Maria mounted their horses. More slowly, Felix got aboard Amelie.
"Braf, you and Bosc return to the castle quickly," Silvas said. "Your duty lies there."
"I can have six dozen warriors here in ten minutes," Braf said. "This fight does not look to be against the walls of the castle."
"Still, you belong there," Silvas said. "While you defend them, I'll
know that the Seven Towers still stand."
Braf hesitated briefly, fighting the instinct to persist. Then he nodded. "Aye, lord. We'll see to the Seven Towers."
"Braf, if it comes to the last extreme, take everyone in the castle toward the south pass. Together, at least, you and Bosc will be able to break through the barrier to get everyone out."
"It won't come to that, lord," Braf said. He turned and started back toward the Seven Towers at a trot. Bosc was hard-pressed to keep up.
"Invaders come through the eastern gap," Silvas called to the villagers who had gathered.
"They what put a wall around us?" March the miller asked.
"The same," Silvas replied. "They're no longer content to isolate us. Now they would destroy us for fair."
"Not an' we kin help it," March shouted, and there were ragged cheers of encouragement from some of the other villagers, more of whom were arriving with every minute.
"Then follow me," Silvas said.
Silvas and Maria started east along the road. Felix kept his horse as close to Bay and Camiss as he could. Josephus and the other soldiers were behind Felix, too close for the former monk's comfort. He feared they might ride right over him if he was not careful. The villagers, all of them on foot, trailed after, quickly lagging behind the mounted folk. As soon as the group was formed up and moving, Josephus spurred his horse and moved forward to ride alongside Silvas and Maria.
"They will outnumber us by at least three to one," Josephus said. "I speak only of our soldiery and theirs, not of these farmers who tag along."
"Don't slight the farmers," Silvas said. "These are not such a common lot despite their trade. They have heart, and they'll not flinch at anything."
"Still, lord…"
"We use what we have. These who follow us will make the odds two to one, or less."
"The guards from the castle would have added nicely to our numbers, and with skill."
